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8 ways to check whether you have really understood your studies

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8 ways to check whether you have really understood your studies

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You might have heard of the concept of "teaching to the test".

It's teaching that's not necessarily about true understanding of the material, but instead about maximising the possible marks you could get in an exam scenario. That might mean focusing narrowly on the topics the exam covers, and ignoring related material. It might mean prioritising memorisation over deeper analysis. It might mean a relentless focus on the particular form of the exam (a particular style of essay, or answering multiple-choice questions) rather than looking at the subject more broadly.

With higher-level exams, or well-written exams more generally, teaching to the test often does still leave you with a solid understanding of the subjects you've studied, as you couldn't have passed your exams without them. And you may be grateful for being taught to the test if you end up with better exam results than you might have achieved from a more holistic approach.

But you might also find yourself wondering whether your top marks actually reflect real understanding, or just the fact that you know a particular exam format inside out - and if you're facing university admissions interviews, or other non-exam tests of your knowledge - it's probably worth knowing the answer. Here are eight ways to tell how deep your understanding of a subject goes.

1. Teach someone else

The classic way of checking whether you've actually understood what you've been taught is to teach someone else. For instance, if you're revising with a friend and you have different levels of knowledge on different topics, then teaching one another is a great way to see how deep your understanding goes. Often you only realise that you don't understand something as well as you thought when you have to explain it - for instance if you've memorised a term, but don't entirely grasp its definition. However, if you've been taught to the test, trying to teach someone who's going to be taking the same test might not reveal gaps in your understanding, as their approach will be broadly the same as yours.

If you have a patient parent, sibling, or friend who isn't taking the same exams as you, trying to teach them what you've learned may be a better option. They won't have the same mindset as someone focused on your particular exam, so the questions they ask and the points that they get confused about will be more useful in figuring out the gaps in your own knowledge. It may be that you know a great deal of answers to questions about how something works or what happened, but not the answers to why - and that's the kind of question that someone you're teaching is likely to ask.

You don't need to be an expert in teaching for this method to work, by the way. Just spend an hour or two trying to explain your notes, or the focus of a couple of your lessons in school, and that should do the trick. After all, if you're explaining things to someone who won't be taking the exam, if they actually learn something from you, it's a bonus, not an essential.

2. Try out a different set of past papers

Using past papers is a great way to revise, but it might seem like the ultimate in being taught to the test - you're literally assessing how well you can do at the exam, rather than looking at your knowledge and understanding in general. Yet if you're someone who likes the concrete approach of being able to give yourself a score out of 100 (rather than, say, trying to figure out if it's meaningful that you can't explain a particular technical term to your parents), then there is still an option for using past papers.

For popular subjects, there are a whole range of past papers available beyond the ones for your particular syllabus and exam board. It may be that the curriculum has changed, and only papers from a particular exam board and from the past three years are useful in predicting your ultimate mark in the exam. But they aren't the only ones that are useful in testing your knowledge more generally. You could look at different exam boards, which might cover different material or use different question styles. You could try some much older past papers, if you can get hold of them (your school may have a dusty storeroom somewhere that you might get permission to look through). Depending on the subject, you might even be able to take past papers from a different country. The overall content should be broadly the same (there are only so many ways to teach calculus or ) but any exam-specific strategies that you've learned won't be useful to you, so it's a purer test of your knowledge.

3. Set yourself questions an examiner wouldn't ask

On a similar note, try coming up with questions that an examiner wouldn't ask. If your subject is something like Maths, this is likely to be quite tricky, but for something like History or English it's reasonably straightforward. One way to come up with essay questions an examiner wouldn't write is to come up with something ridiculous. That might be "Why is Of Mice and Men so short?", "Should be ginger?" or "Was Henry VIII really annoying to live with?" Think about the kind of thing a toddler might ask, and take it from there.

This is worth doing because it leads you to approach the topic from a different perspective. In some fields, you're likely to have learned a few defining themes to focus on. In the case of , that might be revenge, tragedy and madness. Every exam question will pick up on one of these identifiable themes, though it might take some digging to get to it. But this approach to a topic means that you might never have considered the topic without immediately resorting to those themes - so for instance, you might never have thought about from the perspective of war and international politics, and might struggle to know how to answer a question about it. Coming up with questions outside the box like this can help highlight gaps in your studies.

4. Compare what you know with more advanced materials

More advanced courses can go two different ways. Sometimes, you'll have to specialise, and focus on an ever-narrower field of study. Sometimes, you'll be expected to increase your range and breadth of understanding. When studying literature, for instance, you'll go from being asked about the interpretation of specific themes to being expected to figure out what the important themes are for yourself. You can expect a lot less spoon-feeding of information at more advanced levels regardless of whether you'll progress to greater breadth or greater depth.

This is great if you're trying to assess your own level of knowledge. More advanced textbooks should be easy enough to borrow from your school library, and you can read through the introductory chapters to see which parts you can and can't understand on the basis of your previous studies. You shouldn't look too far ahead (so don't go from GCSE to university-level material, for instance) but a year or two above your current level is fine.

5. Test your knowledge in the wild

Your understanding of certain subjects is best tested not in an exam hall, but in real life. The most obvious example of this is foreign languages, where the main purpose of learning them is to be able to communicate with people in that language, alongside understanding it in other forms, such as reading literature written in it.

You might be able to handle set conversations about ordering a meal in a restaurant, booking a hotel room or discussing your hobbies, but that's no good if you struggle the instant you have to use the language in a context that you haven't specifically practised for - for instance, if you're on holiday in a country where the language is spoken, your car breaks down and you have to explain to the mechanic what happened. Using the language in real life is the best way to find out where there are gaps in your vocabulary - for example, would it have occurred to you normally to learn the words for 'tyre' or 'steering wheel'?

There are other examples of how this can work beyond foreign languages. You might be using your Maths skills for budgeting (though that might sound like basic arithmetic, comparing savings accounts can be complex) or seeing how what you've learned in Religious Studies compares to the actual religious practices of your friends and family.

6. Try counterfactuals

A great way to see if you've understood the topics you've learned enough to analyse them, rather than just regurgitating things you've memorised, is to look at counterfactuals. This is easiest to explain from the perspective of History, but could work in other subjects as well.

Essentially, instead of looking at what happen, you can look at what might have happened but didn't, and think about what that might have led you to conclude instead. Set yourself lots of questions along the lines of 'what would have happened if...?' and work out the answers. For instance, what might have happened if Henry VIII hadn't married Catherine of Aragon, or if the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V hadn't been her nephew? It'll require you to think about causes and consequences from a different perspective, and that can be valuable.

But this needn't be restricted to History. For instance, you could look at famous experiments in Physics, and consider what the conclusions might have been if the results had been just a little bit different. You could assess how our approach to particular texts in English Literature might change if we were to learn that their authors had been someone different entirely. With a little bit of thinking, you can come up with this kind of question for most subjects.

7. Analyse the subject itself

There is debate among historians about the value of looking at counterfactuals; some argue that it's a different perspective that can enhance our understanding of what actually happened, while others suggest that it's pointless to study things that didn't happen. This debate is an example of historiography: the study of the methodology of historians.

Similarly, there's a debate in the study of Literature that asks whether the author of a text is in any way relevant to the study of that text. Formalism, for instance, is a type of literary theory that argues that a text should be analysed without reference to its context; that focusing on the author or the history of the times in which the text was written means that proper literary analysis of the text is given second place to what is essentially biography. Other schools of literary criticism argue that texts can't possibly be fully understood without reference to their context.

Many disciplines have this kind of meta-level discussion of how the subject should be pursued - there's historiography, literary theory, and jurisprudence, which is the philosophical theory of law, among others. Looking at your subject from this level illuminates your understanding not only of what you've been taught, but also the way that you've been taught it.

8. Test yourself with Oxbridge interview questions

Interview questions at Oxford and Cambridge are notoriously challenging, and that's partly because they're specifically designed so that memorisation of information isn't good enough; you have to be able to analyse your subject. (The other reason, of course, is because they're intended to root out the best of the best among the candidates).

You might think that you know a great deal about all the poetry you've studied at school, for instance, but can you answer an Oxbridge interview question like 'should poetry be difficult to understand?' Similarly, another classic Oxbridge interview question is 'tell me about a cactus', which demands not only that you provide information about cacti, but also that you're able to figure out what's relevant and what's not. The answer to 'tell me about a cactus' could be quite different depending on whether you're being asked this in the context of Biological Sciences, Ecology or something completely different like Fine Art. There are plenty of example Oxbridge interview questions available online for you to test yourself with, and see how deep your understanding of your subject really goes.

Image credits: bookshelf; typing at laptop; pointing at globe; past paper on table; small girl; library; chalkboard; question mark; kitten looking at pile of books; cactus reading the dictionary

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8 Ways to Check If You've Really Understood Your Studies

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You might have heard of the concept of "teaching to the test". It's teaching that's not necessarily about true understanding of the material, but instead about maximising the possible marks you could get in an exam scenario. That might mean focusing narrowly on the topics the exam covers, and ignoring related material.

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More than rote learning

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The abstract concepts of educational psychology can be surprisingly useful for students.

There have been many different attempts to classify students' levels of understanding in order of difficulty by different educational psychologists. These range from Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking Skills , to the DIKW pyramid , to the somewhat daunting 16 tiers of Michael Commons' Model of Hierarchical Complexity . If getting to grips with all of these different ways of classifying understanding sounds a bit too much like hard work, it's reassuring to note that they agree more often than they differ from one another, so there are generalisations that can be made between them.

But why is this useful? Where an understanding of the different levels of educational complexity is invaluable is those occasions where your teacher is asking you to step up in some fashion, but you're not entirely sure what it is that you're not doing yet. For instance, you might have had feedback saying that your essay contains too much explanation, and not enough analysis. Or you might be getting lower marks than a friend whose understanding of the topic seems to be on a par with yours. Chances are, what you need to do is step up to the next level of educational complexity.

It is worth noting that many of these different models and taxonomies have been criticised in various ways, usually because they are too rigid or prescriptive, or the ways in which they have been used in an educational context go beyond those for which they were intended. In this article, we're going to suggest a few ways that you can use these models, but do remember that they aren't meant to be taken as fixed and absolute, just used as most benefits your own learning.

Bearing that in mind, here's our guide to levels of educational complexity, and how you can use them in your learning:

1. Remembering and repeating

The most basic level of educational complexity - agreed on by almost all theorists - is the level of remembering and repeating. This is something that can be done by computers, humans and any animal that can be trained. For instance, domesticated rabbits can be house-trained; they are able to remember that they have been encouraged to use a litterbox, and then they can repeat this action. It doesn't mean that they understand what a carpet is, or why you might prefer to keep it clean.

This is the level of complexity that you can achieve by rote learning. You can recite that one times three is three, two times three is six, three times three is nine and so on, without necessarily having any understanding of number theory, or being able to work out that three times four is twelve. With times tables in particular, it's easy enough to spot when they have been learned by rote without understanding - it's when someone can repeat that three times six is eighteen, but can't work out that this means six times three will come to the same number.

Despite this being the most basic level of complexity, rote learning isn't something to be sniffed at. For instance, in maths and science, there may be formulae that you want to be able to memorise in case you need them, but the hard work of puzzling them out is something you're prepared to save until it becomes essential.

Being able to learn by rote can save you in subjects that you struggle with, as well. For instance, you might not be able to get your head around Middle English enough to know what Chaucer is on about when he says that "the yonge sonne/ Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne" in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, but if you can recite it as evidence that the tales are set in the spring, it might be enough to get you through an exam question even if you don't understand it. (For reference, 'the Ram' refers to the constellation of Taurus, and the sun being in Taurus indicates the time of year).

2. Understanding information

When you remember and repeat, you deal with data - text and numbers that are meaningless without context applied. When you understand something, you deal with information, which is data with a context. To use the rabbit example, the rabbit doesn't understand why it isn't allowed to pee on the carpet, it just does as it's been told. You, as a human, do understand why, and could probably list several reasons. Being able to remember and repeat is a commonplace skill; being able to understand is restricted to a far more limited range of species.

Demonstrating understanding is usually quite straightforward. For instance, if you can explain something in your own words, then that indicates that you have understood it, rather than simply repeating it. Different educational systems approach this differently; while some will prefer you to demonstrate understanding by phrasing things differently from how your teachers or textbooks did, others will prefer you to use a given phrasing. However, for your own understanding, you should be able to paraphrase at will, even if that isn't the version you're encouraged to write in exams.

Although understanding is still a relatively low-level educational skill, it's at this level that many students become stuck. An answer based on understanding is what you might instinctively give when a task says something like "explain why", such as "explain why castles have high walls". You might say that castles were defensive buildings, and high walls are harder for attackers to climb than low walls. This is the kind of answer that computers can be programmed to give - but you'll see that there are many additional levels of complexity to come.

3. Applying knowledge

Some models go straight from understanding to analysis, but another level that can be helpful to include in between the two is application. Applying knowledge means taking the knowledge you have gained in one place and using it in another. Once you start applying knowledge, you can learn through deduction and create syllogisms. A syllogism is a statement where you draw a conclusion from two premises - so, to take our castle example, you could say high walls were useful for defence in medieval times; castles have high walls; therefore castles were useful for defence.

But in that syllogism, you were only working with the information you already had from the 'understanding' level. Knowledge is information that can be applied in other circumstances. So you might apply your knowledge about castles and high walls to thinking about watchtowers, and noting that they too have high walls - therefore, they, too, are useful for defence.

You might at this point be thinking of other medieval buildings with high walls that were not intended for defence (or much use for it), such as cathedrals. If so, great. If you have the information that cathedrals have high walls but were not defensive buildings, you can apply that and gain the knowledge that medieval buildings could have high walls for all kinds of different reasons. When put so bluntly, this might seem obvious, but students who are stuck at the 'understanding information' level might just pick on the first explanation that they can think of, without applying other information to work out if it's the right explanation or not.

4. Analysing knowledge

This is the level that you will be expected to start operating at from secondary school onwards. Trying to work out the difference between understanding and applying knowledge, and analysing it - and how to level up from one to the other - has given many students a headache. We'll try to clarify it here.

Let's go back to the question about the castle - "explain why castles have high walls". At the level where you both understand and apply knowledge, you might say that castles have high walls because high walls are a status symbol that will impress peasants; because they enable soldiers to look out for approaching danger; because they enable those same soldiers to defend against enemies. You might know that cathedrals have high walls to glorify God, but that this isn't relevant for non-religious buildings like castles, so you don't include it. And you might think that's a pretty thorough answer, job done.

But there isn't any analysis in the above answer. When you are analysing, you ask why. Why are high walls a status symbol? Why does it matter if the peasants are impressed or not? Why do soldiers need high walls for defence, rather than just a big hill, or other fortifications? Why are high walls useful for medieval defences, but less so in later centuries? Why are there enemies against which the castle needs to be defended? Why are walls the particular height that they are, and not a lot higher or a lot lower? With analysis, the amount of depth that your answer could go into is nearly endless. You can see a book - or a series of books - deriving solely from what seemed like a basic question about castle walls.

5. Applying wisdom

At the upper reaches of the levels of educational complexity, the models start to diverge. Some put analysis and evaluation on the same level, or add in other concepts, such as creativity. Furthermore, the definitions of concepts start to become a little fuzzier, such as the difference between 'knowledge' and 'wisdom', which forms the basis of the next level that we've identified. You might well have heard the quote - misattributed to a variety of different people - that "knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." It's witty, but it's hard to know exactly how to apply it if you're writing an essay.

One way of looking at this is that it's about relevance. You that a tomato is a fruit, but that knowledge is irrelevant in a fruit salad context, where what you actually want is sweet fruit that might go nicely with some cream. Going back to the castle example, the questions that you came up with for your analysis would fill several books - so applying wisdom involves knowing which ones to answer in a 10-mark question and which ones to discard. It's knowing that your answer probably shouldn't begin with the origin of agriculture, even though you can follow a thread of analysis that leads you directly to the height of castle walls.

Exam technique belongs in this category, as well as how you present your knowledge more generally: being succinct, or using persuasive techniques, for instance. It's also about being able to assess reliability in the sources you encounter. You can see how the categories begin to overlap; you might be able to present information in a persuasive manner at a stage before you can analyse it, for instance.

6. Evaluating in the abstract

The highest-level skill, which some people don't develop until they reach university, is being able to evaluate everything you have learned on an abstract level. Going back to castle walls, it's the ability to read Medieval Fortifications and Their Extended Purposes and Castles: A Military History , compare the points of view expressed by the two authors, assess which one, if either, you believe to be correct, and come to form your own opinion.

In order to do this, you need to be able to understand, apply knowledge, analyse and assess relevance, as well as looking at the bigger picture, come to your own conclusions, and defend your own opinion. In other words, you need to have a command of all of the other levels of thinking skills in order to be able to evaluate in the abstract; you can't jump ahead through the levels. You also need a good deal of data, information and knowledge to begin with, or your evaluation will have no foundations, regardless of your level of critical thinking skill.

You can assess whether you've mastered the skill of evaluating in the abstract by seeing if you can defend perspectives other than your own, or if you can transfer your analysis from one domain to another - for instance, can you take your understanding of medieval castle defences in the UK, and use them to analyse Aztec defensive structures? Can you see the points where it might be applicable, and the points where it would fall down? If so, well done - you've figured out how to evaluate a topic in the abstract, and by implication, the other levels of thinking skills as well.

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The 6 Levels of Educational Complexity and How to Use Them

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The abstract concepts of educational psychology can be surprisingly useful for students. There have been many different attempts to classify students' levels of understanding in order of difficulty by different educational psychologists. These range from Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking Skills , to the DIKW pyramid , to the somewhat daunting 16 tiers of Michael Commons' Model of Hierarchical Complexity .

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The Guardian article 2017

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The weeks and months leading up to exams can be challenging for students (and parents and teachers alike). Now more than ever, young people seem to be feeling the pressure. So how can students revise better? Which techniques really work, and which don't? What can students do to improve their memory, mood and concentration?

Before you do any revision

1. Eat breakfast
It is estimated that around 27% of boys and 39% of girls skip breakfast some or all of the time. It's not called the most important meal of the day for nothing: research has found that skipping this meal significantly reduces students' attention and their ability to recall information. Simply having a bowl of cereal will give students the concentration and memory boost they need.

Evidence suggests students who study in a quiet environment recall more than those who revise while listening to music

2. Put your phone away
This should be an obvious one, but for many it isn't. Phones can be distracting; they are linked to fomo (fear of missing out), and evidence shows that undergraduate students who spend more time texting and using social media get lower grades. In another fascinating study, researchers found that the mere sight of a phone was enough to reduce a person's ability to focus. The implication couldn't be clearer: out of sight really is out of mind.

During revision sessions

3. Start early and spread it out
Actors don't leave their rehearsals until the day before opening night. Athletes don't only train the day before a match. To commit something to memory takes time. Spreading out your revision sessions on a particular topic (eg one-hour sessions over 10 days) is more effective than spending the same amount of time in one go (ie 10 hours in one day). This effect, known as "spacing", helps because it allows time in between revision sessions to forget and re-learn the material. This strategy has been labelled as "one of the most robust across the entire history of experimental research on learning and memory" (pdf).
4. Test yourself
Leading researchers in the field of memory consider testing yourself as one of the most effective ways to improve your ability to recall information (pdf). Testing yourself also helps you check for any gaps in your knowledge. Practice papers provide a good starting point, as well as quizzing yourself at the end of your revision session.

5. Teach someone
After you have tested yourself, teach the material to someone else. This has been found to help aid memory and recall: it is known as "the Protégé Effect". Teaching someone else requires you to learn and organise your knowledge in a clear and structured manner.

6. Think twice about using highlighters
Despite being the favourite weapon of many students tackling revision, research suggests they don't work very well. People learn and recall information better if they connect it to other pieces of information. Highlighters don't do this, they isolate single pieces of information. Quite often, students end up highlighting whole chunks and passages of text, which can give the appearance of having worked hard, but is of little value.

7. Don't listen to music
Parents around the world rejoice: you now have a legitimate reason to insist that your child stops listening to Justin Bieber on repeat. Students who study in a quiet environment can recall more than those who revise while listening to music. Extroverts, and those with an exceptional ability to control their attention, are not negatively affected as much: but it doesn't help. At best, for these students, it just doesn't hinder them as much as everyone else.

8. Get some fresh air and exercise
You cannot work all day, every day. Nor should you. Revision has to be about quality, as well as quantity. Going outside and getting some fresh air helps people feel refreshed and better able to focus afterwards. Furthermore, doing a little bit of exercise helps people deal better with stressful situations: it reduces anxiety and increases self-esteem.

9. Sleep
Students are encouraged to work hard and revise a lot before their exams: however, there comes a time when they need to stop and go to sleep. Knowing when can be tricky. There is a link between being a perfectionist and struggling to sleep. If a child is falling asleep within five minutes of their head hitting the pillow, they should probably be going to bed earlier. Other sleep tips include having regular bedtimes, not being on your mobile phone in bed, but if you are, turning down the backlight on it.

As research into psychology continues to develop, we learn more and more about how best to help students learn. Revision time can be challenging as it often requires students to monitor their own behaviour when working independently at home. Hopefully, by teaching them about what helps improve their memory, mood and concentration, we can better equip them to meet the challenges head on.

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The science of revision: nine ways pupils can revise for exams more effectively

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The weeks and months leading up to exams can be challenging for students (and parents and teachers alike). Now more than ever, young people seem to be feeling the pressure. So how can students revise better? Which techniques really work, and which don't? What can students do to improve their memory, mood and concentration?