Random Numbers a new study skills method for GCSE and A-level

I am a mathematics teacher and taught some study skills when teaching night classes of people who had failed maths GCSE, perhaps several times. These students need to change how they studied. I recall one student who had failed five times, yet she passed when I taught her better ways to revise. I will now discuss one of my suggestions called Random Numbers.

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Random Numbers:

Basically, we complete one exercise problem from each chapter of the textbook and see how many we get right. 

Say, an exercise set has 18 questions, and you decide to attempt one question, which question? You can chose one of the questions at random, and the way to do it is to use your calculator. On my Casio calculator I press SHIFT then RAND# then =. That gets a random decimal number between zero and one. Multiply by 18. Then round up to the nearest whole number. So, 0.35 rounds to 1; 5.0234 rounds to 6, 5.568 rounds to 6, and 17.456 rounds to 18, etc.

Now most textbooks have sets of exercises covering each chapter’s work. This is usually at the end of the chapter. We apply the random number technique to each chapter in turn using the review exercise at the end of the chapter. Just do one exercise per chapter.  So, we are covering the entire book (or subject) within a night’s work. Students recorded their scores and gave themselves a percentage.

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This is sound revision as the mind must be alert to anything that might come its way and therefore it’s like an exam. Whereas just revising each chapter separately allows you to have a narrow focus and is nothing like an exam.