How to Excel in A level Biology

A level Biology is a challenging course that demands a lot from students. So what is the difference between students that excel and those that struggle? It’s not quite as simple as “the top students are smarter”, or “they spend more time studying”. There’s a lot more going on.

Here are some key factors that apply, and ideas for how you can get better grades.

Prior Knowledge

Going to see cute animals at the zoo is a valid study technique

Everything you learn will be built on top of things you already know, and linked to them. Students who are already familiar with organisms or concepts that come up in class will find it easier as they have a base to build from. Your GCSE knowledge will be vital, but general knowledge from life is very important too.

• Spend time watching nature or farming content, reading medical news stories, and other content around biological topics. If your school subscribes, then “Biological Sciences Review” is written for A level Biology students and is excellent.

• Go to the Zoo, or Botanical Gardens or Natural History Museum, when you look at an organism think about how it feeds, what habitat it lives in, how at avoids predation, what adaptations can you see that lead to survival or mating ?

• This isn’t about learning difficult, deep concepts, but just getting a broad foundation of familiarity with the natural world that you can then build your A-level understanding upon.

• How’s your maths? If you struggle with maths, it’ll make learning some concepts extremely hard. Take time to recap your GCSE knowledge. We have some articles to help, including on Surface Area and Volume Ratio; Averages, Range, and Standard Deviation; and Graphs and Tables.

• Language matters too. Students with lower literacy will struggle with the huge amount of language and vocabulary in A level Biology. If you come across words you aren’t confident with during study, stop and check your understanding. It’s better to slow down and learn words properly so you can use them later, rather than push on regardless. If you can’t understand the explanations or exam questions, you’re not going to get top grades.

Think

How often do you look like this while studying?

This might seem obvious, but you really need to think about the material. Many students sail through GCSE with top grades by memorising things, and never thinking too deeply about anything.

But at A level you need to know why and how, and to understand things at a much deeper level than could ever be captured on a flashcard, or even a memorised paragraph of text. This catches a lot of students out.

You will need to make real mental effort, and really challenge your understanding. Think about things from different angles and with different examples. You need to do more than just remember what’s on the slide, you need to take time to build a deep understanding from it.

Two students sitting in a classroom might look like they’re doing exactly the same thing - both paying attention to the teacher and writing notes. But if one is just copying down what the teacher is writing on the board while the other is thinking about the content and checking their understanding as they go, then the latter will get better grades. You can’t see what other students are doing, but I bet you that the person getting top grades in your class is thinking hard all the time.

Gamified apps sell the lie that we can learn without mental struggle, and some people believe that struggle demonstrates a failure on the part of the teacher or subject. But cognitive scientists and learning researchers are clear that this is not true for academic subjects*, and definitely not for A level Biology. Confusion and struggle are a required part of effective learning.

(* Effortless learning is only really a thing when you’re very young, learning basic requirements for social life and survival).

Make the most of your Working Memory

Help your brain by giving it nice spoonfuls of things to think about, rather than a firehose of information

You will be processing a lot of information through your ‘working memory’ during this thinking. This is the bit of your brain’s activity where you consciously think about things and make sense of them. This processing moves information into your long term memory, and builds up concepts to use later.

Working memory is limited, and is a huge bottleneck on learning.

• Dodgy companies will try to sell you apps to boost working memory by training, but these are a scam. The research is clear that these methods do not work.

• Maximise your working memory by getting good sleep, food, and exercise. It might sound boring but a lack of any of these things can reduce your processing capacity. Which will affect everything you do while studying. Especially try to look after yourself before exams as you’re going to need all the working memory you’ve got.

• An invisible trick used by top students is to break up information into small chunks, so that you can process one chunk at a time. If something is overwhelming, stop, back up, and break it down into smaller tasks. Good teachers will help with this, but you need to learn how to manage the information flow yourself as only you know how much you can process effectively at one hit.

The working memory app scam works because users develop tricks to break up the app’s tasks into chunks and to take shortcuts. And so they do get better at the tasks in the app with time. This makes them think it’s working … but in fact there’s no change in actual working memory. No improvement is seen when they are tested on totally different working-memory tests. So they are not going to help with your A level Biology.

Focus on breaking information up. It might feel like it will take longer, but what’s the point in speeding through if you’re not learning anything?

Process Goals, not Product Goals

During your course, you will probably be asked to write an essay, complete a test, or take notes. It’s all too easy to think that the completion of these tasks is an important goal, and that finishing them means you’re progressing well through the course.

Thinking that the goal is to complete the task is what leads people to use AI, or copy from other people. They find tricks to complete the assigned work as quickly as possible and with the least mental cost to themselves. Brains are lazy, this is very human behaviour.

Now … the next thing I’m going to say might be one of those things that’s it’s impossible to communicate. One of those bits of wisdom that you can only ever learn through experience. So maybe I’m wasting my time here. But I’m still going to try because it’s so absolutely central and it will change everything about your approach to your studies … if you can grasp it.

Your notes, your essay, your answers to that test? They’re not important

The reason you’ve been asked to produce these things is not because there is any value in the paperwork. I know - you have to do them, so completing them is a task ticked off - but the materials you produce are not the point. The world does not need more A-level essays about genetic diseases; your teacher already knows the answers to those exam questions. The examiner is never going to look at your beautiful notes (and anyway your text book already contains all the important information you need, with fewer errors).

Your overall aim is to get a top grade in the exams

To achieve a top grade, you need to learn. You need to construct a real understanding of the topics in the spec. Through thinking about the topics, you are effectively building a complex, biology-exam-answering machine in your brain - a tool you can use to quickly process exam questions to produce mark-winning answers.

So, what’s the point of homework or tests then? The point is that this work is designed to make you think, and process information. It’s the thinking that is the thing of value. Taking short cuts is just cheating yourself out of an opportunity to build understanding. Brains are lazy, but you need to make yourself focus and think and avoid short cuts.

Your objective is the process of learning, which takes time and mental effort

Imagine if you decided to go out for a lovely countryside walk to get some exercise, but then took a short cut so that you got back home within five minutes. Well done, you got home quickly, and you can tell people you went for a walk. But did you achieve your objective? Sometimes the journey itself is the important thing, even when you have no visible evidence that it ever happened.

Want more?

I’ve written a series of “How To Revise A Level Biology” articles, which you can find here. It digs more deeply into some of these concepts, and also gives some more useful tips.

Good luck, and keep thinking! Brains can do incredible things when you put them to work. Think hard and you will find you have more opportunities, more capability for creative thought, and a richer life than anyone who has sailed through life taking the short-cuts.

And you’ll get a better grade for A Level Biology.