DoRevision
Teacher guide

How DoRevision uses evidence and cites sources

DoRevision treats three kinds of claim differently. An external research claim links to the study or the guidance it came from, so you can check it yourself. A claim about an exam board points at that board's published specification. A number about DoRevision says plainly that it is ours, how it was counted and over what period, because a self reported figure presented as independent evidence is not evidence. We do not publish invented teacher quotes, invented schools, or outcome figures we cannot show the working for. If a section needs proof we do not have yet, we leave the section out rather than write around the gap.

Most claims in education marketing are unfalsifiable. This page sets out what we will and will not say, so that when a page here does make a claim you can tell which kind it is.

Claims about research

Where a page says that something works, it links to the study or the guidance behind it, and it says what that evidence actually covers. Research done with undergraduates in a laboratory is not the same as research done with Year 11 in a classroom, and a page that blurs the two is not worth reading.

Where the evidence is contested, we say so rather than picking the side that suits us.

Claims about exam boards

A statement about what a specification requires points at the board's published specification for that qualification. Boards revise their specifications, so those claims carry the review date of the page, and a page is re-checked when the board publishes a change. The specification a piece of content is mapped to is visible on the revision pages, and the boards' own assessment material sits alongside it in the past paper archive so you can check a claim about a paper against the paper itself.

Claims about DoRevision

Any figure about DoRevision itself is labelled as ours and comes with the method: what was counted, over what period, and from what population.

Our data has a real limitation and we would rather state it than bury it. The people who use DoRevision chose to use it, so they are not a representative sample of GCSE students, and a figure drawn from them describes our users rather than the country. Where we publish our own numbers, that caveat travels with them.

Claims we will not make

  • Grade improvements attributed to using DoRevision, unless a study we can publish in full supports it
  • Teacher quotes or school case studies that did not happen
  • Usage or adoption figures we cannot reproduce from our own database
  • Comparisons with named competitors based on anything other than their own published material

Reporting a problem with a source

If a citation on a page is wrong, out of date, or does not support the claim it is attached to, tell us. How to do that, and what happens next, is on the about page.

Related for teachers

  • How DoRevision writes its teacher material Who 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.