How Do I Design an Effective Review Session?
An effective review session is more than an opportunity to revisit material before an exam. It should help students retrieve what they have learned, organize their knowledge, identify gaps in understanding, and practice using that knowledge.
The following approaches and strategies are designed to help ensure the review sessions help students retrieve what they have learned, organize their knowledge, identify gaps in understanding, and practice using that knowledge.
Avoid Re-Lecturing
One of the easiest review sessions to create is also one of the least useful: moving quickly through previous slides and summarizing everything that has been covered. This can create a sense of familiarity without requiring students to determine what they actually know.
Instead of re-presenting information, create opportunities for students to retrieve it before you provide it. For example, rather than showing a slide summarizing the characteristics of a condition, first ask:
“What are the major clinical findings associated with this condition?”
After students retrieve what they can, use the slide to confirm, organize, clarify, and elaborate on their responses. The difference is small from an instructional standpoint but significant from a learning standpoint: students must attempt to retrieve the information rather than simply recognize it when they see it again.
Start With Retrieval
Begin the review by asking students to recall important information without immediately consulting their notes or course materials. For example:
- Write down the three most important concepts you remember from this unit.
- List the major steps in this process from memory.
- What conditions should be included in the differential for this presentation?
- Draw the pathway we discussed without looking at your notes.
Students can then compare their responses with a partner, their notes, or an instructor-provided answer.
Retrieval serves two purposes: it strengthens access to previously learned information and reveals what students cannot yet reliably recall.
Organize, Don’t Just Revisit
Students may remember many individual facts while still lacking a coherent understanding of how those facts relate to one another. Use review sessions to help students organize their knowledge.
Ask students to:
- Create a concept map.
- Complete a comparison table.
- Categorize conditions according to meaningful characteristics.
- Reconstruct a process or pathway.
- Arrange concepts into a hierarchy.
- Identify relationships among topics covered at different points in the course.
For example, rather than reviewing four similar conditions one at a time, create a table and ask students to determine the findings that are most useful for distinguishing among them.
This helps students develop the organized knowledge structures they will need to retrieve and apply information later.
Ask Students to Compare and Contrast
Comparison is particularly valuable when students need to distinguish among concepts, conditions, mechanisms, or treatments that share similar characteristics. Ask:
- How are these two conditions similar?
- What finding most clearly distinguishes them?
- Why would one treatment be appropriate here but not there?
- Which features are diagnostically useful and which are shared by both?
Students move beyond remembering independent lists and begin developing discriminating knowledge: knowing not only what something is, but how to recognize when one concept applies rather than another.
Practice Questions
Practice questions can be extremely useful, but the learning occurs primarily in the reasoning and discussion surrounding the question, not simply in revealing the correct answer. After students respond, ask:
- Why is this answer correct?
- What information in the stem should have led you there?
- Why is each distractor incorrect?
- What misconception might lead someone to select that option?
- How could the case change so that another option became correct?
A single question explored thoroughly may provide more educational value than rapidly completing many questions.
Match the Type of Thinking Students Will Need
Review should reflect the cognitive demands of the course. If students will be expected to apply knowledge on an assessment, a review consisting entirely of factual recall questions provides incomplete preparation.
Include opportunities to:
- Recall foundational information.
- Interpret findings.
- Apply concepts to new situations.
- Compare alternatives.
- Analyze brief cases.
- Make predictions.
- Select appropriate next steps.
- Explain or justify decisions.
The goal is not to reproduce examination questions. It is to give students practice performing the types of thinking the course expects them to do.
Use Short Cases
Clinical cases do not need to be elaborate. A few lines may be enough:
A 68-year-old patient reports sudden, painless monocular vision loss upon waking. Examination reveals decreased visual acuity, an afferent pupillary defect, and optic disc edema.
Then ask:
- What are you considering?
- Which information is most diagnostically useful?
- What additional information would you want?
- What is the most likely diagnosis, and why?
- What finding would cause you to reconsider?
Brief cases allow students to retrieve foundational knowledge while practicing how that knowledge is used in clinical reasoning.
Have Students Explain Their Reasoning
Do not stop when someone provides the correct answer. Ask them how they arrived at the answer. Having students explain their reasoning can reveal whether a correct answer reflects sound understanding, partial understanding, or fortunate guessing.
You can also ask other students if they approached the question in the same way. Different explanations can provide useful opportunities to compare reasoning strategies and address misconceptions.
Let Students Do Some of the Explaining
Faculty do not need to provide every explanation during a review. Ask students to explain concepts to one another. For example:
- Present a question.
- Have students answer independently.
- Ask them to discuss their reasoning with a partner.
- Have them answer again.
- Discuss the reasoning as a class.
Explaining an idea requires students to retrieve and organize their knowledge rather than simply recognize an instructor’s explanation. You might also consider using the Think/Pair/Share method.
Use Student Questions, But Add Structure
Asking, “What questions do you have?” often produces silence or a collection of highly specific questions that may not reflect the most important learning needs.
Instead, ask students to identify questions before the review session. You might ask students to submit:
- One concept they still find confusing
- One topic they would like additional practice applying
- One distinction they have difficulty making
- One question they encountered while studying
Review the responses for patterns and use them to help plan the session. During class, you can also ask students to identify their muddiest point before opening the floor for questions.
Correct Misconceptions Explicitly
Review sessions provide an excellent opportunity to identify common misunderstandings before they become entrenched. When a misconception emerges, do more than state the correct answer. Explicitly explain how and why the misconception is incorrect (in a polite and reassuring way). For example:
“It is easy to conclude X because ____. However, the important distinction is ____.”
You can also ask students to explain why the misconception is attractive and what information allows them to reject it. Understanding why a wrong answer is wrong can be particularly valuable when students must distinguish among similar concepts.
Don’t Turn the Review Into an Exam Preview
Students naturally want to know what will be on an upcoming examination. A review session should clarify the scope and expectations of learning, but it should not inadvertently narrow the curriculum to a list of testable facts or reveal specific examination content.
Avoid statements such as:
- “Make sure you know this for the exam.”
- “There will definitely be a question about this.”
- Instead, connect emphasis to learning:
- “This is an important concept because it explains several of the clinical findings we have discussed.”
Students should leave understanding what is important and how ideas fit together, not possessing a map of individual examination questions.
Study Guides
Having students develop study materials can be useful because creating them requires retrieval, organization, and prioritization. Providing a comprehensive instructor-created study guide, however, can sometimes shift those decisions back to the instructor. If you provide a guide, consider using prompts rather than answers:
Instead of: “Signs of Condition X: A, B, C, D”
Consider something more like: “How would you recognize Condition X? Which findings are most useful in distinguishing it from Conditions Y and Z?”
The guide then becomes a tool for retrieval and reasoning rather than another document to reread.
End With Metacognition
Reserve a few minutes at the end of the review for students to assess their own learning. Example prompts might include:
- What can you now explain without assistance?
- What are you still uncertain about?
- Which topics require additional practice rather than additional reading?
- What should you prioritize when you study next?
Students often judge learning based on familiarity: This looks familiar, so I must know it. Encouraging them to identify what they can actually retrieve, explain, and apply without assistance provides a more useful basis for deciding what to study next.
A Simple Review Session Structure
An effective review does not need to be complicated. A 50-minute session might look something like this:
5 minutes: Retrieve
Students independently recall major concepts or complete a short retrieval activity.
10 minutes: Organize
Students compare, categorize, map, or connect important concepts.
20 minutes: Apply
Students work through several carefully selected questions or brief cases and explain their reasoning.
10 minutes: Clarify
Address common misconceptions and student questions.
5 minutes: Plan
Students identify remaining gaps and determine what they should study next.
The specific timing can vary. The important feature is that students spend substantially more time thinking than the instructor spends reviewing slides.