‘Exam season’ (as it is colloquially known) can often evoke feelings of stress and anxiety amongst students. To counteract this, St Catherine’s provides students with study skills sessions as part of our Thinking Agenda. These sessions highlight effective study and thinking strategies to assist in developing a sense of competency and control in preparing for examinations.  

In the Senior Years, students work through an Academic Advisory Module on study planning, in addition to targeted Year level sessions at Years 11 and 12 (in August and September respectively) to allow for long-term preparation for VCE exams. This is based on evidence that spacing practice is far more effective in embedding knowledge in long-term memory than intense periods of study close to an exam.  

Recently, students in the Middle Years were provided with an exam skills study session by Madame Florence Mélinand as their final Academic Advisory lecture of the year, where she modelled how to create and action a two-week study plan.   

So, what works? 

Studies show that the majority of students rely on three ineffective, low-utility exam strategies that are established as habits early in their studies. They are: 

• Cramming (rote memorising content)  
• Re-reading content and highlighting  
• Rewriting notes 

It is therefore important for students to abandon these habits in favour of more effective strategies based on the science of learning that will deepen their understanding as well as increase the adaptive flexibility needed for examination performance. These include:   

• Retrieval practice (using strategies to retrieve information from memory)  
• Spaced practice (spacing practice over weeks, as opposed to cramming)  
• Deliberate practice (gathering feedback for improvement and subsequently practising with a specific goal in mind, as opposed to simply doing the same thing. This tendency is also shared with high-performance sports or artists). 

Students have been equipped with a range of strategies to choose from in actioning these three forms of practice. They include cue cards, peer-quizzing and graphic organisers for retrieval, and metacognitive thinking routines and practice questions for spaced and deliberate practice. 

Implementing these strategies, while avoiding the ineffective ones listed above (alongside other ‘do-nots’ such as comparison and pseudo-study) should assist them to face the examination period with confidence.