5 Tips for Preparing for School Exams
‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail’ – Benjamin Franklin
Children are put under a lot of pressure these days to do well in exams at school whether it is for GCSE’s or A-levels. Teachers are also under enormous pressure to hit targets for league tables and OFSTED reports and this can be fed down to the children. Exams are often made out to be so ‘BIG’ and children are warned that they affect the rest of their lives. A great deal of pressure can also come from parents, who naturally want the best for their children. Children can feel additional pressure if their siblings have performed particularly well.
All this pressure can lead to anxiety and stress, which can be debilitating. Even the most intelligent children can freeze in exams. Children should be reassured to stay positive and told that it’s not ‘The End of the World’, if they don’t go as well, they can take them again. Luckily with good preparation and these useful tips, passing school exams can be made easier.
Good preparation and plenty of practice are key factors to success in passing school exams, which only helps to reduce stress, anxiety and build confidence.
Here are 5 useful tips to help prepare for school exams.
1) Visualize exam success
Children can experience exam stress and anxiety by playing out scenarios in their minds of taking the exam and imagining them selves performing badly in catastrophe scenarios.
With simple visualization techniques it is possible to reverse this unhelpful habit. It is useful to do this at the beginning of each revision session, by visualizing doing the test with ease and confidence.
Follow this process:
Close your eyes and imagine that you are watching a large movie screen in front of you and you are the star. Imagine yourself taking the exam, calm and relaxed. See yourself calm and relaxed reading the questions, thinking for some moments before confidently answering the questions. See yourself completing the exam and feeling happy with your performance. Now see yourself getting your results and passing. Notice the feelings you get of success and allow that feeling to pass through your body.
2) Exam state control
Imagine a circle on the floor in front of you. Fill it up with the feelings that will help you perform at your best during the exam e.g. relaxed, confident, focused, motivated.
For each of the desired feelings go back to a time in your life when you really felt that feeling in your life e.g. when you were relaxing on the beach. The moment you start to feel that feeling inside of you, step into this circle.
Step into this circle and let the feelings spread through your body. As you feel them, visualize yourself taking the exams, doing well, and handling unexpected challenges with ease.
After you have repeated this process several times, you will start building up positive associations with exam taking.
3) Bite size chunks (create a revision time table)
‘How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time’ – old proverb
Some children can be a bit overwhelmed by the enormity of the material that needs to be covered in the syllabus. It’s very easy to procrastinate and leave preparations to the last minute. This leaves them to cram last minute revision in, which is never a good idea and it only add to feelings of anxiety. It can be very tempting to stay up late the night before an exam. The best advice is to aim for 8 – 10 hours sleep before an exam.
The earlier you can start planning the better. Get organized and soon as you can get an understanding of all the material that is likely to come up in the exams and create a revision timetable by dividing the material into bite size chunks.
Some children find 30 minutes a good amount of time to be revising for, after that your brain starts wandering and you’re not focused properly. The strategy should be to revise for 30 minutes and take a short break. Do something enjoyable like a chat with a good friend or a little walk in the sunshine and then revise a different subject for a further 30 minutes.
4) Smarter Revision techniques
Some people find a study group made up from a group of friends useful. If you don’t understand something, sometimes a friend can teach it to you and vice versa.
It can also be fun to studying with friends. There’s something about fun and laughter that aids memory. When learning quotes from English literature, try reading them out in funny accents. You’ll usually find that laughter ensues.
The more positive associations you can build with studying and exams the better it will be.
5) Practice and improve technique
‘Practice makes perfect’
There are various different types of exams. They can involve memory, problem solving creative writing and more practical demonstration of skill.
The good news is that with experience you will start to notice patterns and will improve your technique. It’s useful to find past papers and practice the papers under exam conditions.
Some teachers often advise to read all the instructions on the exam paper before you begin and that will help avoid silly mistakes. Some children find that by answering some of the easier questions first, this helps to build confidence to tackle some of the more challenging later.
But, what is important is that you remain flexible and do what works for you.
In addition to these 5 powerful tips, whist studying it is important to eat healthily, take regular exercise and to ensure you keep hydrated by drinking plenty of water. Deep breathing can also help you to remain calm and focused.
By Nigel Pinto
Hi Nigel,
I think this is a good, clear article with some well presented practical tips (and I shall definitely be following point 1 in my own endeavours at the moment!)
I liked the layout, it carried the reader through the piece in a user-friendly way.
I also liked the seamless blending of NLP tips in points 1 & 2 with the down-to-earth, common sense advice in the later points.
If I had to quibble, I would say that it might be helpful to rethink the opening at bit. Whilst true, and justified by the context, it’s not always helpful to keep reminding people how stressful exams are. In a piece designed to defuse exam stress, a predictable reiteration of the idea does at some level just reinforce negative pathways. I grant it’s a tough one to crack, but may provide food for thought next time?
It would also have benefitted from a friend proofreading it before posting. Every so often it is marred by occasional lapses of expression: misalignment of singular and plural nouns, “Notice *the feelings* you get of success and allow *that feeling* to pass through your body.” And grammatical slips: “It can also be fun *to studying* with friends.”
However these are minor points. All in all, a very good article.
All of your techniques for overcoming exam stress are positive, user friendly and valid. You’ve also written in a way that a non – NLP professional can easily grasp which makes it easy to carry out the suggestions you have made.
I think in a way you have two articles happening simultaneously as you seemed to skip between referential indexes. Sometimes it reads as if you are talking to a parent/teacher and at other points as if you are giving advice directly to a young person.
It might be worth splitting the article or at least introducing the techniques by saying “You can ask pupils to…” so the steps you have suggested are still aimed at the adult reader, rather than flipping at that point to talking to the child.
Granted “5 tips for preparing for school exams” could cause us to think we are creating 5 tips for children, but actually 5 tips for helping parents prepare would be interesting to! 1) Make sure you child gets plenty of sleep, 2) consider diet etc…
The other angle on that, is that it will most likely be parents and teachers reading this piece of work, and as such you should really pitch your article to them as they are the ones who will make a booking with you as a result of reading it.
Fabulous, insightful discussion on a real educational issue at the moment. Being a teacher (hopefully not the type that induces stress) I see kids struggle with anxiety on a daily basis and I like the helpful and easily applicable techniques. I will try the circle activity with my students.
Maybe a point to consider, exams at GCSEs cannot be re-taken anymore due to government changes and therefore techniques for exam stress are even more pertinent in today’s society.
Thanks for the article 🙂
i agree with the majority of the advise and believe it could be very useful to students taking part in their exams, as it covers everything you need to consider. i think it would be a good idea to add a few points aimed at parents so they are not only aware of what the children are going through but also how they can support them. one other method that could be pointed out to help could be motion memory, in which the students can do significant things like picture an object or certain song to help them remember sections of information. an example of this is writing a song to revise a mindmap or another creative way could involve using objects in your room to link to certain parts of information and then replaying these like a story. finally it would be important to mention how students can use imagery like doing mindmaps in a vary of colours or use pictures so the facts will stand out to them significantly more. however overall i felt this article was lively and very useful for a student in my position.
I enjoyed this article and as a parent of 3 competitive young girls I do get concerned that they will add unnecessary pressure onto themselves. It is difficult not to put pressure on your kids to get the best for (and from) them so I will use this advise for their future exams. I do agree with the other posts that maybe an article for parents and an article for the students would be beneficial and grammatically this could be better but the message is definitely there
All interesting reading. Tip 1 is a useful skill and could be applied to other tasks.
Without doubt preparation is the key to success. Success is the result of confidence. Confidence comes from experience, experience starts with practice and practice comes from determination.