How to Revise for GCSE Biology

Having spent many years as a classroom teacher, A Level Biology examiner, and Biology tutor, I have worked with a wide range of students towards exam success, and I hope to be able to help you progress beyond merely reading notes with your highlighter pens (hint: this revision strategy isn’t very effective!) and to give you some top tips for effective GCSE Biology revision. Let’s get started!

Plan your revision 

Cramming the night before your GCSE Biology exam might feel effective, but I’ve had many a post-exam debrief with disappointed students who admit that they left their revision to the last minute. Research shows that cramming doesn’t lead to long-term learning, and you’ll never have time to revise for an entire GCSE Biology paper in those final hours!

• Print yourself a calendar: know when your exams are and work backwards to ensure that you have enough time to revise the whole syllabus.

• Be realistic when planning revision sessions; keep them short (e.g. 25-30 minutes), and don’t give up everything else in your life: instead, plan your revision timetable around those birthdays and hobbies to avoid revision guilt!

Know your GCSE Biology specification

Planning a revision timetable without knowing what to revise just doesn’t work. Make sure that you know the specification for your exam board, especially if there are small differences between, for example, combined science and a separate Biology GCSE.

• It can be a good idea to print out the specification for your course and work from a list of specification points that you can tick off as you go. 

• Remember that our revision notes at Save My Exams are laid out to match each specification and you can tick off the notes you’ve covered, and untick those that you need to revisit! You can find our GCSE content for different exam boards below:

  • AQA GCSE Biology

  • AQA GCSE Biology: Combined Science

  • Edexcel GCSE Biology

  • Edexcel GCSE Biology: Combined Science

  • OCR Gateway GCSE Biology

  • OCR Gateway GCSE Biology: Combined Science

Use active revision methods  

On occasions when I have given students lesson time to revise for an upcoming test, I remember seeing students reading textbooks, or copying out text with different coloured pens. While writing is more active than reading, both of these are examples of passive revision techniques. Be aware that effective revision needs to be active, so choose techniques that will get your brain working! Here are a few examples of evidence-based techniques that I always recommend to my students:

Test yourself! 

There are many ways to do this, but the key point is that you need opportunities to remember key concepts. Research shows that the very act of recalling knowledge from past learning helps to consolidate those memories, and if you can’t recall a topic then you know that you need to revisit it, and then test yourself again! 

Testing yourself could involve:

• Flashcards: write a keyword or the title of a key concept on one side, and a short definition or brief explanation on the other. You can then test yourself by working through your pile of flashcards. Our SME revision notes contain all the information you need to help build up your flashcard collection!

• Exam questions from past papers: our SME exam-style questions, such as these AQA GCSE Biology questions arranged by topic, allow SME subscribers to test basic recall of each topic using easy questions, and to challenge understanding further with medium and hard questions.

• Watch a revision video and pause it frequently to write an explanation of the topic that has just been covered, or to answer a question on the screen. Our SME tutorial videos are great for this!

Keep testing yourself on a concept until you get it right. Put your flashcard back into the pack until you are confident with the answer, and revisit questions on a particular topic until you can get full marks every time.

Explain and elaborate!

When I’m teaching, I often need to find different ways of explaining a tricky idea in order to help different students. This can be very difficult if I haven’t learned the topic well myself! Explaining concepts in detail is a great way to check that your understanding is deep and that your knowledge is secure. You can practise elaborating on your answers in a few ways:

• Keep asking “why?” to see how many times you can keep elaborating on an idea. For example, if the front of your flashcard says “homeostasis” you might begin by saying that this is the maintenance of a constant internal environment, then you might add that this ensures that core body temperature remains stable, then you could say that this provides optimum conditions for enzyme activity, and so on!

• Explain ideas to others: try revising with a friend and explaining concepts to each other, or explain what you’ve been revising to someone else at home.

• Work on past paper questions that are worth multiple marks. Those 4-6 mark questions will require plenty of detailed explanation to get full marks, and familiarising yourself with the mark schemes for these questions is a great way of seeing exactly what examiners want you to know.

Repeat, repeat, repeat!

As a teacher, I am well aware that the topics I teach the most I remember the best. That is because I am actively explaining a topic and I am making use of repetition! Research shows that content learned once is quickly forgotten, but content that is revisited multiple times can be recalled effectively over a longer period. So, when planning your revision, consider the following:

• Don’t plan to spend one week on each subject all the way up to exam day, but plan to cover several subjects over a week, and then come back a week later to revisit what you’ve learned and add to it, and do this over multiple weeks. Try mixing up the order in which you cover your different subjects too!

• I’ve marked many topic tests where it’s clear that the student didn’t pick up their Biology notes between one lesson and the next. Consider starting your revision immediately after you learn a new topic by testing yourself on each day’s work on a regular basis. A great way to do this is to make a few flashcards after each Biology lesson to begin your revision of each new topic.

I know from my own experience, and from working with students, that revision can be tough, but learning how to do it well will stand you in good stead for your GCSEs and beyond!  Why not have a go at using our SME resources to put some of these revision tips into practice, and see whether they can help you to save your exams?

FAQs

How can I use my GCSE Biology revision guide?

Revision guides focus only on the points covered by a syllabus, and will be specific to a particular exam board and a particular course. They can be a less intimidating source of information than a textbook, and they are great for those times when you are checking the textbook and wondering “do I really need to know this much detail?!” The danger with revision guides is that it can be tempting to revert to passive revision techniques. You should instead use your revision guide to apply all of the GCSE Biology revision tips in this article; use it to help you plan your revision timetable, as a source of information for your flashcards, and as a way for family and friends to help test you on your Biology knowledge. Some revision guides may also contain practice questions, so make use of these too!

How long will it take to revise for my Biology GCSE? 

This will depend on lots of factors, such as the length of the syllabus you are following, and the length of time that you, as an individual learner, need to process and consolidate information. Most, if not all, schools run GCSE mock exams, so use your Biology mock revision as an opportunity to practise your planning, and to get an idea of how long you need to cover different parts of the syllabus.

Should I revise using actual past exam papers?

Yes, this is a great thing to do! Practising exam questions one topic at a time is a good way to assess your mastery of a particular topic, but it is really important to get an idea of what the actual exam will feel like. I would recommend leaving actual past papers until close to your exam date; this will allow you to cover enough content to have a fair go at each paper, and will mean that you don’t run out of past papers too early on in your revision!

What about mind maps?

While I have recommended mind mapping to my students as a revision tool in the past, the scientific evidence on mind maps is mixed. Therefore, as with most of the methods in this article, effectiveness is likely to come down to how you approach the process! Spending hours producing a beautiful mind map, then putting it on your wall and ignoring it, will not be a useful exercise in the long run, but a mind map that is produced using an active process and then used to fuel further revision could be useful. Consider the following ideas:

• Use both words and images on your mind map. These could be biological diagrams, or any images that help you to memorise a particular idea. Will drawing out a food chain help you to remember how energy flows through an ecosystem in the ecology topic? If so, include it in your mind map!

• Be concise, just as you would if you were producing a flashcard; don’t copy out the whole textbook onto your mind map, but distil the information to its essentials. You need a good understanding of a topic to be able to summarise content in this way, and it will prevent your mind map from becoming too visually cluttered.

• Use your mind map to make connections between different ideas. This will make you a better biologist, and could also help with recall. For example, if you cover viruses in the cell biology topic and again in the disease topic, you could draw a line to link these concepts.

• Test yourself on sections of your mind map. Use it to write your own revision questions, or cover parts of it up and then recall them from memory.

• Put your mind map away and have a go at reproducing the whole thing from memory!