With only one hour a week, there’s only so much knowledge you can impart on a student or practice questions you can critique. Sometimes the most important thing you can teach a student, especially an older student, is how to study efficiently and effectively, so that they can improve the most in the time that they have across all their subjects. Many students are not taught about study strategies at school and have never heard about concepts like active recall, and therefore often resort to writing and rewriting notes or writing them once and then not coming back to them or jump straight to practice questions before ensuring they have covered all the content.
The most important study skills concept that has helped me learn both in high school and during my university degree is active recall. There were a few strategies I used that I teach to my students. First, I used cornell notes, which involves writing questions next to your notes and testing yourself by trying to answer the questions with your notes covered. Anything I missed using that strategy I would make a flashcard about using the Anki app, which gives you spaced repetition depending on how difficult you found it to recall the content. This strategy ensured that nothing fell between the gaps and I was confident with all content before starting practice questions
Another important strategy for year 12s is to structure their notes by syllabus dotpoints. This prevents students from memorising extra or unnecessary information and also ensures that they are confident in understanding what they need to know.
Some other strategies I suggest is brain dumping, where you try to remember everything you can about a concept and write it down and then compare with your notes to check what you missed. The last option I suggest to students is forming study groups with their friends and teaching their friends a concept. All these strategies use active recall which means students are much more likely to remember information. By allocating a certain amount of time each week to their subjects and using strategies like active recall, students are more likely to remember content and perform well in exams

Maya Anderson