A Parent's Guide To Helping Your Child Succeed At Gcse And A Level

In the modern world, good qualifications are a pre-requisite for almost all interesting and rewarding careers. This means that performing well in exams, particularly GCSEs and A Levels, is crucial for success in life. So to give your child the best start, you need to help them get the grades they deserve. But, if you're not involved in the education profession, it can be difficult to know where to start. This article explains some of key resources that you can use to help your child prepare for exams, as well as providing some general advice.

Revision Guides

One of the most important tools your child will use is a revision guide. Revision guides are essentially compressed text books; they contain all the facts without any padding. This makes them quick to read, but they often don't provide very much in the way of explanation or background. So revision guides are not replacements for text books and they should probably not be used when first learning the material. Their hour comes during the revision period, when there may not be enough time to re-read text books in full.

There are a number of publishers who produce revision guides for GCSE and A Levels and, in practice, they tend to vary significantly in content. Example publishers are CGP, Letts & Londsdale and BBC Bitesize, but there are plenty more. Revision guides can sometimes be ordered direct from the publisher's websites and, of course, bought in your local bookstore. But the thrifty can save a lot of money by ordering through Amazon instead. Amazon stocks almost all the revision guides which are currently on the market, often at prices less than half those of the High Street.

Of course you can still make use of the High Street shops to preview revision guides before you order them. Alternatively, several websites provide reviews of revision guides. One example is www.revision-guides.com, of which I am an editor. This site has reviews of several hundred revision guides covering most subjects at GCSE and A Level, as well as links to order them direct from Amazon. One key feature is that, for many guides, we have screenshots of the contents page and some sample pages. This means that you can get a clearer idea of what you are getting before you part with your money.

Exam Boards

Schools can choose from several different companies who provide exam papers for GCSE and A Level, the main ones in England being Edexcel, OCR and AQA. Although exams from the different providers broadly cover the same topics, there are some differences, particularly in the format of exams. Your child's teacher will be able to tell you which board is being used for each subject; this can be useful as some revision guides are tailored for specific exam boards. Knowing which exam board is being used will also allow your child to attempt relevant past or specimen papers.

Past Papers

Just knowing a lot isn't a guarantee of exam success. Children also need to know how to pass exams – this is known as exam technique. And the best way to develop exam technique is to practice. Most exam boards provide past and sample papers that your child can attempt. Don't under-estimate their value, practicing exam papers is probably the single most effective approach to succeeding at exams. You can find past papers on the websites of most of the exam boards, as well as ordering them in printed form from Amazon. To save you time, at www.revision-guides.com we have links to lots of past papers organized by qualification and subject.

General Tips

There are many different schools of thought on revision, but here are some general guidelines that few would disagree with:

-Everyone has their own way of revising, so while you can make suggestions its best not to impose a method of working on your child.

-Encourage your child to start revising early, this will avoid some of the last minute stressful cramming, and will increase the chances that information is retained.

-Motivation to revise may be hard to find if there is no immediate chance of a pay-off. Praise can encourage your child, as can a reward of some kind to look forward to after the exams.

-Remain positive – there are times when the revision will not be going well, and your child may need extra encouragement to stick with it.

-If you are lucky enough to have a very highly motivated child, try to make sure that they don't work too hard. Short breaks every now and again, particularly with a change in activity, will help to keep the mind sharp.

I hope this article has been of some help. You can read more thoughts on effective revision at www.revision-guides.com/effective-revision.php.

References

The following were used to help compile this article:

http://www.ofqual.gov.uk/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents/work/secondary/revision/revision_help.shtml

http://www.leighacademy.org.uk/project/uploaded-media/the-parents-guide-to-exam-revision.pdf

http://www.merlinhelpsstudents.com/parentsguide/helprevisegcses.asp