Author: SmartRevise

In an age of AI-generated content and endless question banks, Smart Revise takes a different path—one grounded in cognitive science and the best classroom practice. Designed to help students retain knowledge long-term, Smart Revise uses three distinct modes—Quiz, Terms and Advance—to deliver an experience that is both focused and effective.

Rather than overwhelming students with novelty, Smart Revise embraces repetition of high-quality, human-written questions to strengthen memory. This approach is not only intentional—it’s backed by decades of research.

The science behind Smart Revise

Smart Revise is built on two of the most powerful, evidence-based learning strategies:

• Retrieval Practice: Research by Roediger & Karpicke (2006) shows that actively recalling information improves retention.
• Spaced Repetition: First described by Ebbinghaus in the 19th century and refined in modern cognitive science, this technique involves reviewing material at increasing intervals to combat the forgetting curve. Studies (Cepeda et al., 2006) confirm that spacing out revision leads to better long-term retention.

Smart Revise integrates both strategies into its core design, helping students move knowledge from short-term to long-term memory—a critical factor for exam success.

Why fewer questions work

Unlike many platforms that use AI to generate thousands of questions, Smart Revise uses carefully curated content written by experienced teachers and examiners. This ensures alignment with specifications and avoids the pitfalls of poorly constructed, irrelevant or even inaccurate questions.

While this means the number of questions is finite, it’s a deliberate strength. Repeated exposure to the same questions helps students build familiarity, reinforce neural pathways, and ultimately master the material.

The three modes of Smart Revise

Quiz Mode: Targeted Retrieval Practice

Quiz mode presents a fixed set of multiple-choice questions, typically three or more per specification point. These questions are designed to:

• Assess understanding of key concepts.
• Highlight misconceptions.
• Reinforce distinctions between similar ideas.

Smart Revise uses algorithms to prioritise questions students get wrong and deprioritise those they’ve mastered. This ensures that revision is always focused on the student’s current needs. Being low-stakes aligns with the principle of desirable difficulty—the idea that learning is most effective when it’s effortful but achievable.

Terms Mode: Vocabulary Mastery

Terms mode focuses on subject-specific terminology drawn directly from the course specification. Using the built-in Leitner system, students rate their confidence using a red-amber-green system, which feeds into a spaced repetition cycle.

This mode supports semantic memory development, helping students internalise the language of the subject—essential for understanding exam questions and constructing accurate responses.

Advance Mode: Exam Technique and Application

Advance mode offers written-answer style questions. Unlike Quiz and Terms, this library grows over time, offering increasing variety while still allowing for repetition.

Advance questions help students:

• Practice applying knowledge in context.
• Develop familiarity with command words and mark schemes.
• Build confidence in structuring extended responses.

All the modes support interleaving—the practice of mixing topics—which has been shown to improve transfer of learning and adaptability in exam scenarios (Rohrer, 2012).

Tasks: integrated, intentional practice

Teachers can assign Tasks giving the same questions to all students that draw from all three modes. Repetition is expected—and desirable—in Quiz and Terms. In Advance, repetition will decrease as the library grows, but it remains a valuable part of the learning process.

Marking from Tasks writes back and over-rides data from Quiz, Terms and Advance. Updating each student’s Quiz question stream priorty, RAG ratings in Terms and marks awarded in self-assessed Advance questions.

Challenging the “more is better” myth

Many tools pride themselves on offering tens of thousands of questions or AI generation to avoid repetition, but repetition of well-designed questions is far more effective.

Smart Revise helps students practice, improve and eventually master a defined set of questions—an approach that builds confidence and leads to better exam outcomes.

Conclusion: Smart Revise, smarter learning

Smart Revise is more than an assessment and revision tool—it’s a research-informed system that values quality over quantity, mastery over coverage and memory over cramming. By combining expert-written content with proven cognitive strategies, it offers students and teachers a smarter way to prepare for exams.

Students have three flight paths that show their progress with the content in Smart Revise. The blue line shows progress with Quiz (multiple choice), pink is Terms (definitions) and green is Advance (written answers).

Selecting “expand” will show the student a more detailed daily breakdown too. Each dot representing a day they logged in and used Smart Revise.

Teachers can see the flight path for each student in their analytic reports, and the more detailed view by selecting “Load full data”. A top tip is to hover over a dot to see the date and the progress on that date.

Students should aim to be in the green “target cone” at all times, and the teacher can set the parameters for that in the class and individual student settings.

Quiz progress

Every time a student answers a Quiz question correctly the count for that question increases by one. The algorithms will reprioritise the question in the queue, but each question can be answered correctly up to three times to count towards flight path data. So, think of each question being worth 0-3 points. If a question is answered incorrectly, it is given a much higher priority, so will be more likely to be shown again in the near future but will also have its count reset to zero. This is the reason that flight paths can go down too.

If a course has 600 questions and the student has answered every question correctly three times, that would be 1800 points or 100%. Imagine a student that has mastered 75 questions (that means correct three times in a row), 20 questions answered correctly twice, 10 questions answered correctly once, and 8 questions answered incorrectly. Their progress on Quiz can be calculated as:

(75 * 3) + (20 * 2) + (10 * 1) = 275. If there are 600 questions in the set, the maximum is 1800, so 275 is 15%.

Remember that Quiz questions asked in a task also contribute to flight path progress when the marks are released to the students.

Terms progress

Each term can be self-assessed by the student as red, amber or green. Only green terms count for the flight path so if there are 200 terms and the student has 30 marked green then their progress on Terms would be 15%.

When terms definitions are asked in a task, the student must score full marks for the term to be recorded as green and have a positive effect on the flight path. Anything less and the answer won’t count.

Advance progress

Advance is much more complex. Questions are tagged as easy, medium or hard and students must have answered a range of questions across the three difficulties to achieve 100%. They do not need to answer every question to achieve 100%, but they cannot answer all the easy questions for example without their progress being capped.

We aim for students to be “exam ready”. In classic revision that would mean having attempted and received high marks across a range of past papers. Smart Revise captures this by ensuring students must have achieved a given number of marks in easy, medium and hard questions to achieve 100% progress. For example, that could be 100 marks of easy questions, 100 marks of medium questions and 100 marks of hard questions. Every mark is worth a point. The harder questions are worth more marks, and therefore there are more flight path points to be gained.

The target cone

The green area on the flight path is known as “the target cone”. The cone starts at a date decided by the teacher and extends to the end of the course. Students should be aiming to be within this green target cone at all times. By default, the lower line at the bottom of the flight path, known as the minimum expectation line is set to 60% and the line at the top of the target cone, known as the aspiration line is set to 80% at the end of the course. That means to be within the target cone at the end of the course students must have completed 60-80% of the content within Smart Revise.

The flight path start date, minimum expectation and aspiration target can be set by the teacher at a whole class level or it can be different for each student. Read our helpdesk article to find out more:

How do I view flight path data or change the settings?

How much engagement do students need to be within the target cone?

This is a difficult question to answer because it depends on the minimum and aspiration target. The more students use Smart Revise the greater their progress will be. Generally speaking, 35-50 Quiz questions per week for GCSE students and 40-70 questions for an A level student should enable them to achieve 100% by the end of the course if they begin within the first two months of starting the course. Essentially, if a student is below the target cone they should do more, and if they are within the top half of the target cone they are doing well. So the target is really, “be within your green target cone”. If this isn’t challenging enough, increase the minimum expectation in the class configuration settings.

All the questions students answer in Tasks also counts towards progress on their flight path once the marks are released to students. This may cause their position to go up or down!

Progress and grades

There is a clear positive correlation between the number of marks a student achieves in Smart Revise and the number of marks they are likely to achieve in a real exam. It stands to reason, the more revision and practice of questions they do the better a student will perform in an exam. However, progress in Smart Revise and grade boundaries are not related. It is not possible to say that 60% progress is the same as 60% in an exam. Therefore, we advise caution when interpreting the data in that way. See flight paths more as an indicator of how much students are using Smart Revise and how well they are answering questions. I.e. the amount of content they have seen and their confidence.

Of course, it is possible to set flight path targets to match target grades based on exam grade boundaries, and this is a good starting point, but always raise expectations with the flight path. Set the minimum and aspiration targets in Smart Revise to be higher than target grades.

Smart Revise will always try to prioritise questions from newly unlocked topics so that students see new material first. As a teacher you will then have data about misconceptions and knowledge gaps quickly after a topic has been taught, however it does require you to remember to unlock those new topics for students too!

In the class settings there are three levels of control in addition to setting which particular topics are available to students.

Teacher controlled topic filtering

Teacher controlled is for your day-to-day use of Smart Revise. It will ensure that students focus on newly available questions first and after that the algorithms will choose an appropriate diet of questions from across the topics to ensure knowledge gaps are a priority, in addition to appropriate spaced learning and working towards mastery. Students cannot control which questions they are asked with this setting.

Teacher guided topic filtering

Teacher guided gives students the freedom to choose their own topic filters but only from those you have enabled. Students can do this either from their topic filters button on their dashboard, or by selecting a pie chart on their progress summary report. This option is great when students are preparing for an end of topic test but have not covered the full course yet. You don’t want them to see questions from topics that you haven’t taught.

Student controlled topic filtering

Student controlled gives students full control over all the topics in the course. It enables them to focus on a single topic or a range of topics at the same time. This is great at the end of the course once teaching is complete, and students are in that final revision stage, often on study leave.

You might be tempted to use teacher guided most of the time as it strikes a balance between teacher and student control. However, it will encourage students to engage in what is known as “blocking” where they are likely to focus on a very narrow range of questions, aiming to master a topic before moving on to the next. At face value this seems reasonable, however, there is a real risk that once questions have been mastered and their summary report shows a full green pie chart that students will not see the need to return to that topic again. This will inadvertently introduce the forgetting curve and will not help them prepare for exams.

We need to consider that students are not aware of the academic research that indicates blocking and not returning to completed topics could be detrimental to their success. Instead, they should be encouraged to engage in interleaving and spaced learning. That is mixing questions from different topics causing the brain to context switch and aid memory retention over the longer term. Spacing means returning to a question after a period of time has elapsed and not immediately. Students naturally want to correct their mistakes and work through a tick list of topics until they are all complete, but this is not ideal for learning.

More options

You can also control which modes your students have access to: Quiz, Terms reflective, Terms interactive and Advance. It is fine to enable all these from the start of the course. If you are new to Smart Revise and are following our suggested implementation plan, “The Journey”, you may want students to focus on using Quiz for homework initially. In which case enable Quiz but disable Terms and Advance. When you start to use Smart Revise for baseline assessments or monthly reviews enable Terms. Advance includes longer answer questions and some of these are quite challenging, so enable these when you feel students are ready. Perhaps in preparation for their first end of topic test. It’s really up to you how much or how little of the platform you want the students in your class to have access to.

All these topic filters!

It is worth noting that in addition to the topic filters in the class settings that control questions students will be exposed to, the analytics reports that you can use to track progress use their own filters that are independent too. This means that you can analyse the class performance in one particular topic, discovering the top ten least well answered questions in the most recently taught topic while the class are revising a range of topics.

If you join the class as a student in student mode, for example to demonstrate Smart Revise to your class, remember that you will now have a further set of topic filters as a student, depending on the control you have given to the class.

Our suggestion

To keep things straightforward, our suggestion is to:

• Enable all the modes: Quiz, Terms and Advance.
• Set the class topic filters to Teacher controlled.
• When students prepare for tests set them to teacher guided and remember after the test to set them back to teacher controlled.
• At the end of the course set the topic filters to student controlled.
• Tick the topics you have taught to date (not the one you are currently teaching) and put reminders in your calendar to unlock new topics as they are taught throughout the course.

Engaging students

Students would much prefer to have complete control over their topic filters! Tell them why that is not such a good idea. They need to trust Smart Revise to choose questions and topics that the data say they need to work on in a spaced and interleaved way. This is the best method for long-term memory retention.

Tasks is the go-to mode for many teachers. It makes perfect sense as it reflects classic teaching methods. You set a task based on what you taught last lesson, the students complete it, marking happens and then you review the outcomes. Although Smart Revise is a sandbox system and teachers are free to use its features in any way they see fit, there are better ways to create recap and recall activities than setting Tasks.

The difference between Tasks and Quiz

1. Tasks need to be set by the teacher every time you want to use them. Quiz only requires the teacher to tick one new box in the class topic filters after a new topic has been taught.
2. Selecting only relevant questions based on what you taught last lesson from within a topic when creating a Task is time consuming.
3. The students all get the same questions in a Task. This removes the opportunity for automatic personalisation, differentiation and intervention that Quiz provides by selecting the most pertinent questions for each student focussing on their individual knowledge gaps.
4. Setting a Task containing only questions on a narrow body of knowledge creates what is known as “blocking”. Studies have shown that causing the brain to context switch between topics on a larger body of knowledge growing over time, known as “interleaving”, has more impact.
5. A Task has a defined number of questions resulting in some students finishing early and having nothing to do while they wait for their peers. Quiz prevents this from happening by presenting more questions from a priority queue. With Quiz the teacher chooses when to stop the activity.

Effective recall activities

Recapping knowledge from only a couple of the most recently taught lessons using a Task can be illustrated like this:

Instead, recapping knowledge from everything taught so far can be illustrated as:

Committing knowledge to long term memory requires addressing the forgetting curve, and not simply recapping knowledge from recently taught lessons. Of course it is impossible to recap everything during a single lesson, so the situation is more nuanced. Quiz will always choose the questions that are most relevant to each student focussing on:

• Questions that have never been seen before from newly taught topics first.
• Questions that have been answered incorrectly most recently and frequently.
• Questions that have not been asked for some time, creating “spaced learning”.

Spotting misconceptions

Misconceptions can be spotted using the Questions Analysis report. Use the topic filters on the report to home in on particular topics. As students begin to answer these questions correctly, the top 10 questions will change dynamically. Tasks will give you a snapshot in time, which is great initially, but adds little value later. Use Quiz for recall and Tasks for key assessment points instead.

How to set this up for students

Every time you have finished teaching a topic unlock it for students using the class settings, topic filters. Do not lock the previously taught topics or select a topic you are currently teaching. The number of unlocked topics should increase from one to them all as you progress through the course.

Imagine this scenario. You’ve just taught the topic of computer architecture including the purpose of the registers. In class students engaged in answering questions, completed activities and it was a good lesson.

At the start of their next lesson as a recap activity you ask a student in the class, “what was the purpose of the program counter?” The blank face looks back at you. “How can you not know?” you think to yourself, “we only covered this last week.”

Be honest, this happens in your classroom, doesn’t it? The reality is that since your last lesson those students have been bombarded with new information from English, Maths and Science, their short-term memory can only handle so much.

Does it really matter you might ask. After all, when you get to the end of the course you engage in revision and bring all that knowledge back to the fore; but what if there was a better way to learn? What if students could be more confident, more engaged and perform better in tests, mock exams and real exams if they retained more of what you’d taught them over a longer period of time? What if revision at the end of a course benefits the most privileged learners, but does not help the less privileged in the same way? This classic approach to teaching is actually contributing to the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

The better, more successful way

This better way is, “The Revision Revolution” where revision is seen as integral to the learning process. It’s a feature of every lesson. From the very first topic to the very last.

Howell, H, Morrison McGill, R (2022) The Revision Revolution, John Catt.

At its heart revision is about repetition, and the best revision starts early, not at the end of the course. Imagine preparing to run a marathon. Do runners prepare by starting to run 26 miles a few weeks before the event? Of course not. They build up greater distances and stamina over months, if not years of preparation. Running almost every day. Why then should preparing for examinations be any different?

Why not give all students, not just the privileged a better chance of success with an opportunity to recall what they have been learning over and over again in every lesson? Better than that, why not include in that repetition the respected learning theories: spacing, interleaving and personalisation.

It’s pretty obvious. If we don’t regularly recall something we forget it. This is known as the forgetting curve. However, the more we practice, the more we repeat, the more we remember and the more confident we feel.

You might be thinking, “where do I find the time to go back over what I’ve already taught?” The solution is surprising simple. The start of lessons and homework.

Regular recall practice through multiple choice quizzing is in vogue right now and is a key feature in the classrooms of the most successful schools.

The research is clear, regular repetition aids memory retention.

Murre, J., Dros, J. (2015) Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve.

The Smarter way

This is where Smart Revise adds significant value. So named because it is a smarter way to revise. Start every lesson with 7 minutes of recall practice with Quiz. It’s low-stakes so it’s easy to get student buy-in. If you have Craig’n’Dave starter activities for GCSE these are good for engagement on entry, but they are for schools who don’t have Smart Revise. Retrieval practice has more impact because it’s based on academic research.

Smart Revise will automatically space questions so that there is an appropriate gap between students seeing the same question again (repetition). It will interleave questions, that is selecting questions from different topics causing the brain to context switch which has a bigger impact on retention. With built-in personalisation questions answered incorrectly are shown again more frequently until the knowledge sticks.

Classic starter activities are one-size-fits-all. Smart Revise provides a differentiated activity for every learner.

How to set this up for students

1. Every time you have finished teaching a topic unlock it for students using the class settings, topic filters. Do not lock the previously taught topics or select a topic you are currently teaching. The number of unlocked topics should increase from one to them all as you progress through the course.
2. Get students into the habit of entering the classroom, logging on and starting Smart Revise Quiz for themselves at the start of every year 10, 11, 12 and 13 lesson. There is no preparation for the teacher to do.
3. Spend about 7 minutes on Smart Revise. This is an optimal time. The Quiz will never end, it will just loop questions in a priority queue so that the teacher can stop the activity when they are ready for the main lesson.

Ideally students would also use Smart Revise Quiz for homework too. Aim for 35 questions a week at GCSE (including those done in lessons) and 60 for A level. The flight path on the student’s dashboard will show them if they are on track. Teachers can monitor this with the analytics usage report and see strengths and weaknesses in the question analysis and class matrix reports too.

Students will tell you what the purpose of the program counter is with confidence because Smart Revise will have asked them often enough!