Is this studying technique effective?

I'm thinking about trying this new studying technique and I wanna know if anyone has tried it and thinks it's effective. You read the textbook and highlight the important bits, specifically what's in the specification (without making notes). You only make notes if the textbook doesn't explain a concept very well. When it comes to revising you just use the highlighted bits in the textbook and the few notes + exam practice. Does anyone think this is effective for A level Chemistry? Also, I know everyone has their own unique studying technique that works best for them but I just wanna know generally what everyone thinks.

Some people can just remember what they've read without anything else but you really want to work on using the information so that you'll remember it i think

I'm thinking about trying this new studying technique and I wanna know if anyone has tried it and thinks it's effective. You read the textbook and highlight the important bits, specifically what's in the specification (without making notes). You only make notes if the textbook doesn't explain a concept very well. When it comes to revising you just use the highlighted bits in the textbook and the few notes + exam practice. Does anyone think this is effective for A level Chemistry? Also, I know everyone has their own unique studying technique that works best for them but I just wanna know generally what everyone thinks.

I agree with highlighting and summarising notes relevant to the spec, but you need to memorise them. Have you tried flashcards? Summarise the key info on a subtopic into bulletpoints (the less the better). When you're done, read two bullet points, turn the flashcard over then write them down from memory onto a seperate piece of paper. Turn the flashcard over again, if you got them wrong - repeat. If you were right, do the next two bullet points (while writing down the last two to keep recalling that info) and repeat the process untill you have completed the flashcard. Then try to write all the bulletpoints from the flashcard from memory onto a seperate piece of paper. This works wonders for me, it's a form of active learning called 'rote learning' - use this to remember the processes of a formula and combine it with practice questions. Hope this helps!

For me personally, I wouldn’t say this method is effective. This is because simply highlighting and reading the textbook is a passive form of studying. I would need to have a method which stimulates me to think a bit more. I would learn the concepts and make my own notes on it. When it comes to revision I would try to teach it - this way it would be more of an active form of revision and I’m most likely to retain that information. However, I definitely agree with exam practise as revision, as they can help fill in the gaps of your knowledge.
If you feel like your method works best for you, then go for it.

I agree with highlighting and summarising notes relevant to the spec, but you need to memorise them. Have you tried flashcards? Summarise the key info on a subtopic into bulletpoints (the less the better). When you're done, read two bullet points, turn the flashcard over then write them down from memory onto a seperate piece of paper. Turn the flashcard over again, if you got them wrong - repeat. If you were right, do the next two bullet points (while writing down the last two to keep recalling that info) and repeat the process untill you have completed the flashcard. Then try to write all the bulletpoints from the flashcard from memory onto a seperate piece of paper. This works wonders for me, it's a form of active learning called 'rote learning' - use this to remember the processes of a formula and combine it with practice questions. Hope this helps!

Personally, it depends how long and how much time you have on your hands to work with. I have around three months a bit to get all of my revision done before my exams! If this is the same for you then I would recommend making compact, precise notes for each chapter of chemistry preferably from the textbook online as it is much quicker and doesn't take a lot of time looking over and making it look pretty. Once you have done this, answer a test paper from a website, I would recommend the physicsandmathstutor website since it has an exam paper for every topic. Once you have completed this, then perhaps go back and highlight and sub-topics you got wrong in your practice exam paper. That's what I've been doing for Biology and it's gotten me an A so far! and I've only been doing this studying technique for a month.

If you do not have enough time I would recommend doing lots and lots of past papers since it helps with answering questions the way the specification wants you to since this is the trickiest part of the whole course. Remembering content is easy, it's how you apply it. So, yeah, perhaps highlighting important bits will be nice but not effective I don't think. I tried this and got a C but another thing I've started to do when I just want to highlight is making a key for each highlight colour meaning you're actually putting thought into it. E.G. causes (pink), consequences (blue) etc. This makes you think more than just mindlessly highlighting things whenever you feel like it. Hope this helps! Sorry for the long explanation but it's hard to fit in everything to two sentences or so, lol!

I agree. That's quite similar to what I've been doing for the past several months and although I find it very effective, I think it's quite time consuming, especially when doing it for all of my subjects. But, I guess I still have a decent amount of time (3 months too). Also, do you have a link to the online text book you spoke about? Thank you

For science, the textbook I use is on a website called kerboodle. However, you need a login at your school for this I believe. Also if you find it very time consuming instead of writing it out on paper, perhaps write it up on a document. It makes it much quicker. x Or just revise the topics you got the worst marks on on the paper.

Flashcards are a great way to learn and actually retain information. You should check out whyze. They're using AI to automatically turn your content into flashcards without you actually having to do the grunt work. Sign up at whyze.co.uk

Also, another thing I might add is watching the videos that basically summarise everything in like one hour or two. There are many for each paper in science