Why your child shouldn't leave revision until the last minute

There is something strangely reassuring about leaving revision until the last minute. Your child has an exam coming up, so they sit down for a few hours the night before and try to learn everything they need to know. Perhaps they read through their notes, make some flashcards, watch a few videos and test themselves on the important topics. By the end of the evening, it can feel as though a lot has been achieved.

The problem is that learning isn't simply about how much information your child can get into their head in one sitting. It's about how much they can still remember later. And when it comes to remembering, spreading learning out over time is usually much more effective than trying to do everything at once.

Your brain likes to forget

This sounds like a strange thing to say, but forgetting isn't necessarily the enemy of learning. Imagine your child learns ten French words on Monday. By Tuesday, they can remember most of them. A few days later, they have forgotten some. If they then try to remember those words again, the act of retrieving them helps strengthen the memory. Then they come back to them again a few days later. And again the following week. Each time they have to bring the information back to mind, they are giving their memory another workout.

This is known as spaced practice or distributed practice. Instead of doing all the learning in one long session, your child returns to the same information at intervals over time. It might feel less efficient because they have to keep coming back to things they have already studied. But that is part of what makes it effective.

Don't wait until revision week

One of the biggest mistakes children can make is thinking that revision begins when the exam gets close. By that point, they may have forgotten a huge amount of what they learned several months earlier. A much better approach is to keep bringing important knowledge back to mind throughout the year. A child studying biology might spend a few minutes each week revisiting something they learned earlier in the term. A student learning a language might regularly practise vocabulary from previous units rather than only focusing on the newest words. It doesn't have to take hours.

In fact, one of the advantages of spacing is that revisiting something can take surprisingly little time once it has been learned in the first place. Ten minutes today, another ten minutes later in the week and another short session next week can be much more useful for long-term memory than trying to spend 30 minutes learning everything in one go.

Think about learning a person's name

You can see the same thing in everyday life. Imagine someone introduces themselves to you at a party. Five minutes later, you've forgotten their name. A few days later, you meet them again and have to search your memory. You eventually remember it. A couple of weeks later, you see them again. This time, their name comes to you much more easily. You haven't sat down and deliberately studied their name for an hour. You've simply encountered it repeatedly over time. The same principle can apply to learning.

Coming back to something after you've started to forget it can make the memory stronger.

This is one of the reasons cramming can be so deceptive. Your child may be able to remember something at the end of a three-hour revision session, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will still be able to remember it next week.

What can parents do?

You don't need to create a complicated revision timetable to help your child use spaced practice. One simple approach is to encourage them to keep some older material in their regular study routine. If they're revising what they've learned this week, ask them to spend a few minutes also revisiting something from last week. If they're using flashcards, they could keep difficult cards in rotation rather than putting them away once they've seen them once. If they're doing practice questions, they could occasionally return to questions from topics they studied earlier.

And you can help too. Every so often, ask your child something about a topic they studied a few weeks ago. You don't need to know the answer. You're simply giving them another opportunity to bring that knowledge back to mind. It could be as simple as: “You learned about this a few weeks ago. What can you remember?” If they can't remember much, that's useful information. They now know that the topic needs another look.

Don't confuse familiarity with learning

There is another reason spacing can be so useful. When your child studies something repeatedly in one sitting, the information can start to feel very familiar. They look at the page and think, “I know this.” But familiarity isn't the same as being able to remember something later. Spacing creates a more realistic test of whether the learning has stuck. When your child comes back to a topic several days later, they can't rely on the fact that they have just seen it. They have to retrieve it again. That's harder. And that is precisely why it can be useful.

If something feels slightly harder to remember today than it did yesterday, that doesn't necessarily mean your child is getting worse at it. It might mean they're doing the kind of learning that makes the memory stronger.

Little and often beats a last-minute panic

This doesn't mean your child should spend every evening revising for hours. Nor does it mean that every topic needs to be revisited according to a perfectly calculated schedule. The important thing is simply to avoid the idea that learning has to happen in one big block. Encourage your child to learn something, leave it for a while, come back to it and see what they can remember. Then return to it again later. It might feel less satisfying than cramming. There is no big moment where everything suddenly feels finished. But learning isn't really about that feeling. It's about what your child can still remember when they need it.

So if an exam is three months away, don't wait until the last few weeks to start revising. Start now. Learn a little. Come back to it. Forget some of it. Retrieve it again. And keep coming back. Because when it comes to long-term learning, little and often is usually a much better strategy than everything at once.