Studies (see Roediger and Karpicke) have shown that testing or "retrieval practice" as it has come to be known, is key to improving your ability to recall information from memory. The act or recalling information from memory seems to help solidify memories. It seems that testing itself makes the facts you've learnt more likely to stick in your memory.
Testing is key to building your confidence in, and knowledge of a subject.
With this in mind CramNow have developed our Random Retrieval Quizzes. We have taken our topic specific A Level questions and created banks of thousands of questions. These are subdivided into modules, year 12 knowledge, year 13 knowledge and combined Y12 and Y13 quizzes that contain questions from the entire A Level syllabus.
As teachers ourselves, we noticed that there was quite a lot of revision resources out there for GCSE Science but very little for A Level Biology, Chemistry and Physics. What little there is, is usually behind a paywall or requires a costly subscription. With the need for remote teaching and learning now more important due to lockdown, we felt it would be very useful to have a resource that teachers and students can access for free.
Students - you can take these quizzes without fear of failure or judgement. Just have a go, find out what you don't know. There is no waiting for your teacher to mark your work, you get instant feedback while the questions are fresh in your mind. You can take quizzes on subjects that you know you are weak in or take broad, Random Retrieval quizzes that cover entire units or entire years.
Teachers - you will find this site particularly useful for setting self-marking homework. The quiz taker gets an email containing their results and this can be forwarded to you to demonstrate that they have done the work set. In an age where evidencing that remote work has been completed, this is very useful. When classes resume, you could use these quizzes as lesson starter activities. Why not throw a quiz on the interactive white board at the start of a lesson and ask each member of the class to answer a question?
Below are some examples of our Random Retrieval quizzes. These taster quizzes contain 10 random questions, simply refresh the page to get a completely different quiz. To get access to all our questions and unique data sheets and resources to help you answer the questions, simply Click Here sign up for an account. It's free.
