Weekly eNews

Dr Ray Swann

Deputy Headmaster, Head of the Crowther Centre

Study Smart

As exam season approaches, it’s natural for routines to shift and pressure to build. While academic focus is important, maintaining a healthy balance between study and rest is essential for sustained performance and wellbeing.

Parents, you can encourage your boys to prioritise consistent sleep, eat well, and keep up with APS training and co-curricular activities. These simple habits support concentration, memory, and resilience. While cramming may create a sense of short-term productivity, it seldom results in meaningful understanding or sustained learning.

Establishing steady routines, rather than last-minute bursts of study, helps boys feel more in control and better prepared. Short, regular revision sessions, balanced with time to rest and recharge, will ultimately set them up for greater success. 

It can be helpful to remind your boys that exams are just one part of a much broader learning journey, and remember that supporting healthy patterns now will not only enhance performance but also build lifelong habits for managing challenge.

Dr Ray Swann
Deputy Headmaster
Head of the Crowther Centre

Preparing for Tests and Examinations

As we approach the end of the semester, many students are preparing for semester tests and examinations. One purpose of these assessments is to give students, parents and teachers a clear picture of what a student knows and can do.

An additional benefit is that the process of revising for tests and examinations helps students to embed their knowledge in long-term memory. Given that knowledge is what we think with, having knowledge stored in long-term memory is extremely helpful for subsequent learning and thinking.

A key method for revision is retrieval practice, the process of forcing yourself to recall knowledge without referring to notes or other guides. For example, if you are trying to commit capital cities to memory it can be helpful to test yourself with questions like “What is the capital of France?” or “What is the capital of Eritrea?” The act of successfully retrieving information strengthens long-term memory, which is what makes this such an effective revision strategy.

Many students have found cue cards to be a useful tool for revision. To experience the benefits of cue cards, it is important that students first try to retrieve the answer before flipping the card. If you see the card ‘Country: Eritrea’ on one side and then flip straight to the other side to see ‘City: Asmara’, you have not actually retrieved anything, and this alone is unlikely to help embed this into your long-term memory. If, on the other hand, you write down the country ‘Eritrea’ on a piece of paper now, and then in five minutes try to remember its capital city, you will be doing genuine retrieval practice.

One final point about cue cards is that students can sometimes think that ‘doing cue cards’ involves constructing hundreds of cards, dutifully copying out pages of their notes. In fact, it is the act of testing yourself (or having someone else test you) on the contents of those cue cards which is of most benefit in strengthening long-term memory for tests and examinations.

Bryn Humberstone
Associate Head of the Crowther Centre
Director of Teaching and Learning ELC–VCE
Head of Learning Analytics