How to Study for GCSE

By Fintan Darragh

Sadly, you don’t often get told the best way to go about your learning. Here is our guide of a few tips to get you started.

Perhaps you can use a few of the ideas in your own study time?

At School

Constantly think and analyze what the teacher is saying in your head. Think about where it fits in with what you already know and related concepts that might be important to the topic in question.
If you are unsure (even slightly) of anything, ask the teacher and listen hard to the answer. Write it down, along with the question, for later revision. Remember that teachers are your primary learning tool, and you should use them like a dictionary whenever you need to.
Listen to what others say and ask in class discussions. It may be useful for you to know.
Keep clean and readable notes. Try not to write down everything; the key concepts, details and facts are only really needed later on to refresh your memory. Listen and think about the rest of the information that you aren’t writing down. Take a look at this article about making notes and why you should do it.

Complete your homework first. You’ll be better at it the sooner after school you do it, and it will be out of the way for you to do other things.
Take a look at this article on how to manage your time.
Flick through your notes for the day again.
If you are able to amend your notes into simpler and clearer points, do!
Try to draw simple diagrams to demonstrate key concepts.
Think of things in terms of real life, and create mental images to help you remember. For example, in Physics ‘pressure’ is ‘the concentration of a force on a surface,’ so you might want to think of a bottle of orange squash (or ‘concentrate’) on a kitchen surface.
Make a test for you to take later on. Do it on a black A4 sheet of paper with the questions on one side and the answers on the other. 5 simple and quick questions should do for each topic.
After about 30 minutes, take the test to see how much you can remember. What did you get wrong? What do you need to improve on? Remember: practice makes perfect!
You could just find a Buster Tests for your subject and do that.