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How to Revise Lecture Slides (Without Just Rereading)

Most university modules give you the slides, and most students revise by reading through them. That is one of the least effective ways to use them. Here is how to turn a slide deck into something that actually tests you.

Benjamin Tindal 6 min read

Lecture slides are tempting revision material because they are already there, they are short, and they look like a summary of the course. The problem is that reading them back makes everything feel familiar without making it any easier to recall in an exam hall. The fix is not more reading. It is turning the slides into questions.

First, know what slides are missing

Slides are written to support a talk. They carry headings, diagrams, key terms and the odd quotation. What they usually leave out is the explanation: why a result matters, the worked example, the caveat, the "people always get this wrong" warning. Those are often what separates a good exam answer from a list of facts.

So before you revise from a deck, fill it in. For each slide, add a line or two in the notes field or on paper covering what the lecturer actually said. Your own lecture notes, the reading and the recording are the sources. If you only fix one slide in five, fix the ones with a diagram or a single bold term, because those are where most of the explanation was spoken.

Five ways to revise from slides

1. Turn each slide into a question

Look at a slide and ask what an exam could ask about it. A slide titled "Three stages of memory" becomes "What are the three stages of memory, and at which stage do most everyday failures happen?" Write the question on the front of a card and the answer, in your own words, on the back. A slide that only supports one card is fine; a dense one might give you five.

2. Blank out the key terms

Duplicate the deck and delete or cover the key words on each slide. Then go through it filling in the gaps from memory. This is quick to set up, works well for diagrams and labelled processes, and shows you instantly which terms have not stuck.

3. Recall the deck from its titles

Write down only the slide titles, in order. Then, with the deck closed, write what each slide said under its title. Check against the slides and add what you missed in a different colour. The gaps are your revision list for the next session. We cover this in more depth in how to make revision notes from lectures.

4. Explain one slide in thirty words

Pick a slide and explain its main point in thirty words or fewer, without looking. Then explain how it connects to the slide before and after. University exams reward this kind of linking, and it shows quickly whether you understand the idea or just recognise the words.

5. Answer a past question using only what is in your head

Once a lecture's slides are familiar, find a past paper question on that topic and plan an answer with the deck closed. Then open it and see what you left out. This is the closest practice to the real thing.

Why this works better than reading

Pulling information out of memory strengthens it far more than looking at it again. In one well-known experiment, students who tested themselves on a passage remembered more a week later than students who restudied it (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). A large review rated practice testing as one of only two high-utility study techniques, and rated rereading and highlighting as low utility (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

The catch is that testing yourself feels harder and slower than reading, so it can seem as though it is working less. That difficulty is the point.

Come back to the deck more than once

One pass through a deck, however active, fades. Plan to revisit each lecture's questions a few days later, then after a week, then a couple of weeks after that. Each time, skip the cards you get right easily and spend the time on the ones you miss. Spacing reviews out like this beats a single long session (Cepeda et al., 2006).

A worked example

Take a first-year psychology lecture on memory. The slides might have five titles: three stages of memory, working memory is the bottleneck, chunking, context and revision, and exam pointers. From those, you could write:

  • What are the three stages of memory?
  • What did Miller put the working-memory limit at, and what do more recent estimates say?
  • What is chunking, and why does it get round the limit?
  • Distinguish the spacing effect from the testing effect.

Four questions from five slides, each with a clear answer you can check. You can see that lecture turned into notes, flashcards and a quiz on the sample lecture page.

When slides are not enough

The same is true if writing while listening is hard for you. NoteMate's founder, Ben, has dysgraphia and dyspraxia: in a lecture he could listen or he could write notes, but not both well at once, so the spoken explanation was always the part at risk.

If your slides are sparse and you missed the lecture, the spoken explanation is the part you most need. A recording or transcript fills that in. NoteMate records or takes an upload of the lecture and produces the transcript, notes, flashcards and a quiz, with each card linked back to the moment in the lecture it came from. If you already have the text, the free lecture-to-flashcards tool makes a deck from it without an account. For the bigger picture, see how to revise for university exams.

Sources

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