A Revision Tutorial

Post date: May 12, 2017 4:41:06 PM

Exam period is quickly approaching every university in the UK, and Bristol is no different. The first years have their first exam (Introduction to Group Theory) on Monday.

Basically, its the perfect time to hold a revision tutorial. On Thursday, I gave a two hour revision session (with a break in the middle) to all my tutorial groups. The idea was to spend one hour on Analysis and one hour on Group Theory. I tried to schedule this tutorial late enough so that students had a chance to start their own revision, but early enough so that students still had some time to revise afterwards.

My plan was to spend 15-20 minutes on a mind map, and the rest of the hour on questions students had.

To prepare for the exercise on the mind map, I created my own mind map before hand. The idea was that we would as a group create a mind map, and I could double check with my own and see if there was anything missing. I also had in mind that as we constructed the mind map, if the students had any definitions or theorems they were unsure of, I would write it down on the blackboard and talk a bit about it. The intention was that the mind map highlighted the important part of the course, as well as how every item in the course fitted with each other (trying to get students to achieve a global understanding).

As for questions students had, while I expected them to come with questions, I also knew I should prepare several questions on several topics. The idea being that if there is a lack of questions, or if students had vague questions along the lines "can we see an example of X being used", "can we do something on topic Y", then I had some questions ready for them.

I decide to start with Analysis in the first hour and do Group Theory in the second hour. While the mind map in Analysis was very well received, to allow the flexibility of exploring themes and recapping definition, this exercise took nearly 40 minutes. This left us with less time than I wanted to answer questions, and hence I went through less questions than anticipated. At the end of the first hour, the students decided that they would prefer spend 10 more minutes on Analysis, skip the creation of the mind map so that they can concentrate on questions for Group Theory. Hence, this is what we did, but I did pass around the mind map I prepared in case the students were interested in looking at it.

My reflection on this revision session is as follows. While I think the mind map exercise as a group is rather useful (especially for first years who might not know how to make one), this should have been done in a previous tutorial, preferably just before they started to revise. It seems that at this stage of their revision, the students preferred to go over questions and exercises that they think will help them in the exam. But, some preparation is needed, and I thought I prepared well. While I had some specific questions ("Can we go through problem X"), the majority of the questions were along the lines of "Can we do a problem covering X".