Fifteen minutes is enough for a useful bit of retrieval practice, provided you keep the focus tight. Pick one thing you want students to remember, give them a few questions that make them recall it, then give them feedback while they are still thinking about it. You are not trying to reteach a whole topic in fifteen minutes. These activities are designed for one small area, usually with six to ten questions and a clear indication of what students should do next. They can be used as starters, in tutor time, at the end of a lesson or for cover.
Most revision advice assumes you have an hour.
In practice, you often have fifteen minutes at the start of a lesson, a tutor slot on Tuesday, or twenty minutes left after an assessment. Those are useful bits of time, but only if you have something ready to use.
What makes a fifteen-minute activity work
Keep it simple.
One thing to remember. Don't try to cover "photosynthesis". Pick something smaller, such as the word equation or the factors that affect the rate.
Make students recall it. Reading through notes is easy to mistake for revision. A better use of fifteen minutes is getting students to answer questions, complete a sequence, label a diagram or work out a value from memory.
Tell them what to do with the result. If a student gets four out of six, they need to know what to revisit. Getting a score is useful; knowing what to do next is more useful.
Where fifteen minutes fits
The same activity can work in different parts of the school day:
Starter: Recall something from last week before moving on to today's lesson.
Tutor time: Give students something useful to do without needing a lesson plan.
End of a lesson: Check what they have actually remembered while there is still time to address gaps.
Cover: Use an activity that explains what students need to do before asking them to work independently.
Intervention: Use a run of questions to find out quickly where the gaps are.
Each DoRevision module has these tags, based on the activity itself. You'll also see how long it takes on the module page.
What you don't have to do
You don't have to mark it. Students get their answers checked as they work and see the feedback immediately.
You don't have to plan it either. The modules below are ready to use, mapped to a specification and designed to fit into a short slot.
If you need something for a particular lesson or group, build a sprint and share the link with your students.
Browse the revision pages by subject and exam board, or use the official past papers for the same specification when you want students working with the real exam questions.
Is fifteen minutes actually long enough to be worth it?
For retrieval practice, yes. The important thing is regular practice that makes students recall something, rather than how long each session lasts. Fifteen minutes obviously is not enough to teach a whole topic, and these activities are not designed to do that.
Do I have to mark any of it?
No. Students' answers are checked as they work and they see the feedback straight away. There is no class report, because DoRevision does not track which student completed which activity.
Can I see which of my students completed it?
No. A shared link does not record who used it. That is a deliberate choice about children's data, rather than a feature we have left out.
Do students need an account?
They do not need one to look at the page or answer the sample question. They need a free account to work through a complete module and save their progress.
Which exam boards does it cover?
Content is mapped to the published specifications for AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, SQA and CCEA. Each module shows the specification it is mapped to, so you can check it yourself.
Put one in front of a class
Tell us the subject and how long you have. You get a link to hand out, and it marks itself.
How DoRevision uses evidence and cites sourcesThe rules DoRevision follows when a teacher page makes a claim: what gets a citation, how we label our own data, and the claims we won't make at all. Written so you can check our working.
How DoRevision writes its teacher materialWho writes the teacher pages on DoRevision, what we mean when we say a page has been reviewed, how we check that revision content matches the exam board's own specification, and what happens when you tell us something is wrong.
Ready-to-run GCSE revision activitiesA working list of GCSE revision activities, each with the thing it makes students recall, the moment they find out whether they were right, and what they do about it. Some run on a screen and some need nothing but a board.