There could be a major problem with the way you teach kids to revise, according to head of geography Mark Enser.

We can *almost* see you rolling your eyes, but stay with us on this one.

If you were getting your class to revise, say for example, Noel Edmonds’ floundering TV career (we all know you’ve googled it in the past couple of weeks), it’s likely you’d do the following. Step 1: get them to summarise the information. Step 2: use a chapter in a textbook to create a concept map. And then step 3: use these notes to answer exam questions.

But what if, instead of allowing students to use these notes to answer the exam questions, you took them away?

You see, research shows that when you allow students to use revision guides and notes, you stop them from using their long-term memory - the process of “remembering” is outsourced to these tools.

There’s no recall involved in relying on revision guides. Come the exam, when students need to access the information and don’t have their notes or textbooks to hand, they’ll completely forget that Noel was once a member of Brown Sauce (YouTube “I Wanna Be a Winner 1981” - you won’t regret it) or that he hosted Lucky Numbers.

Instead, Enser recommends revision activities that rely on students directly recalling information from memory.

You could get students to create a mindmap on everything they can remember about Noel’s House Party off the top of their head, and then return to their notes to see what they missed. Or ask them to watch Telly Addicts and then write a summary of what they’ve seen.

If you use these techniques, high grades could be a done deal.