GCSE revision intervention a department can sustain
Revision intervention tends to work better as a short repeated cycle than as a programme. Pick one narrow thing a group is weak on, give them a focused activity on it, then check the same thing again a week later to see whether it moved. Ten to twenty minutes a session is enough, and it's easier to keep going than an after school hour. The part that usually gets dropped is the recheck. Without it, nobody finds out whether the intervention worked, and the same students get pulled out again in March for the same topic. We can supply the activities and the marking. We can't tell you which students need them, and this page explains why.
Intervention often starts in October with a list of names and a lunchtime, and by half term it's one teacher, three students and a photocopied past paper. That's usually not about commitment. It's that the plan needed more time than anyone had.
A cycle small enough to keep going
A short, repeated shape is easier to sustain through a term:
Narrow the target. Pick something smaller than "algebra", such as rearranging formulae with a fraction in them. A group can get better at one thing in a session.
One focused session. Ten to twenty minutes on that thing, with students producing answers rather than watching.
Recheck after a gap. The same thing again, about a week later, closed book.
Decide what it tells you. Either it moved or it didn't, and both are worth knowing.
Step three is the one that gets dropped when a term gets busy. Without a recheck, nobody finds out whether it worked, and the same students get pulled out again in March for the same topic.
What we can and can't do here
We can supply the activities, matched to the specification, and mark them as the student works. There's nothing for you to take away afterwards.
We can't tell you who needs intervention. DoRevision doesn't record who worked through what, so it has nothing to say about which of your students is struggling. That comes from your assessment data, your question level analysis and your own sense of the room.
We also haven't measured whether this improves grades, so we won't suggest that it does. Our position on evidence, including how we label our own numbers, is on the evidence page.
Choosing the recheck
The recheck is worth more if it isn't the same questions. If you reuse the exact activity, you find out whether students remember that activity. A different set of questions on the same narrow idea tells you more about the idea.
In practice that means two short activities on one topic: one for the session and one held back for the following week. The list below is filtered to the question-dense activities, which is what you want for both halves. The technique underneath all of this is retrieval practice, and everything is browsable by specification on the revision pages.
From your own assessment data. We can't help with that, because DoRevision doesn't record who worked through what, so it has nothing to tell you about which of your students is struggling. Your mock analysis and your own question level marking are where that comes from.
How long should a cycle be?
One narrow topic, one short session, and a recheck about a week later. Longer gaps make the recheck harder, which is the point of leaving one, but a fortnight is usually as far as you want to go before a group has lost the thread.
Small group or whole class?
Either, and the shape is the same. A shared link works for four students at lunchtime or for a whole set as a starter, and none of it needs a register.
Does it improve grades?
We haven't measured that, so we're not going to claim it. What we can say is that the activities are matched to the specification and marked as students work, so a cycle costs you the time to choose the topic rather than the time to mark the outcome.
What about students who will not engage?
Nothing here fixes that on its own. Short sessions do help with one specific case, though: a student who has decided they're bad at a subject often finds finishing something in ten minutes easier to take than sitting through an hour of it.
Do I need to prepare anything?
No. Pick an activity, share the link, run it. If you want a set for a particular topic and time slot, the sprint builder will put one together.
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.
GCSE revision homework that marks itselfHow to set revision as homework without creating a pile of marking: one link, questions checked as the student answers them, and feedback that arrives while it still matters. Includes what this approach doesn't give you.
GCSE revision without a second marking loadWhat revision homework actually costs in marking time, what a self-checking routine costs instead, and the parts of the job that no amount of automatic checking will take off you. The arithmetic is laid out so you can put your own numbers through it.
Retrieval practice for GCSE, without the markingWhat retrieval practice is, what the research does and doesn't show about it, and how to run it in a GCSE class without making work for yourself. Every claim on this page names its source.