This is a first draft of a chapter from my forthcoming book on A-Level Physics exam techniques.

How to Do A level Physics Properly

How to Learn Physics, Solve Problems, Revise What You Actually Need to Revise, Stop Wasting Time Revising What You Already Know, and Eventually Get Better at Answering Questions You Currently Haven't Got a Clue How to Answer

There is a problem with A-Level Physics.

People think it’s really hard.

Lets be honest, it actually is hard but not for the reason most people think – that physics concepts are difficult to understand.

Most of the students who choose Physics A level are really bright – often the cleverest students in their year. They have usually done well or very well at GCSE, they are comfortable with mathematical and abstract ideas, and many of them genuinely enjoy Physics. (e.g. Finding out about black-holes, reading about how weird quantum mechanics is, studying the technical side of F1, criticising the Physics in movies, finding out why cats always fall on their feet when you drop them, making robots, taking things apart and sometimes putting them back together again, etc etc).

Although some of the underlying concepts in Physics are extraordinarily abstract — energy is a good example — most students can often follow the Physics they are taught without too much difficulty.

They come out of lessons thinking, quite reasonably, Yes, I got that. I understand it. They mull it over for a bit. They answer some end-of-chapter questions on it. Yup it’s all good.

Then they try to answer an A-Level Physics exam question on it.

Uh-oh.

Suddenly, understanding the Physics is not enough. You have to answer questions on it too!

Think about this - answering questions is the only way you are tested on your A level Physics knowledge.

Bother.

Answering questions requires many more skills than just understanding the Physics, and lots of them don’t fall naturally to the sort of students who are comfortable with numbers and equations (the sort of students who tend to take Physics).

They have to read and understand the English of the question (how unreasonable!) to work out what the question is actually asking, recognise which Physics is relevant, identify the useful information, decide which equations or relationships might help and, in a more difficult problem, construct a route between what they have been given and what they need to find.

Not only that, they need to write the English of the answer to ‘wordy’ Explain, Describe or (horror) Discuss questions. For some students this is proper torture!

Understanding Physics and being able to use that understanding to answer a Physics question are not quite the same thing. Nor is either of those quite the same as knowing how to present an answer in the form required by the examiner.

What is missing is Exam Techniques. I can tell you’re surprised! It’s not in the name of this book or anything obvious. (Sarcasm, that was sarcasm, sorry, I’ll try not to do that again)

First, You Have to Learn the Physics

There is no getting around this bit.

Before you can answer questions on a topic, you have to learn the Physics in the first place. That is what your lessons are for. As you progress through the course, your teachers busily stuff more and more Physics into your head, you accumulate new Physics and develop your understanding of it. That is good, that is what Physics teachers and lessons are for. That is what they, and you, should be doing in most lessons. There is a lot of Physics content in every A level specification and you need to know it.

Exam techniques cannot replace Physics knowledge. Neither can problem-solving techniques. If you do not know the Physics required by a question, you have found something that you need to (re)learn.

The misunderstanding comes when students assume that every question they cannot answer must mean, that they do not understand the topic.

You may know the Physics but be unable to work out how to apply it. You may understand the physical situation in a question, but fail to find a route through the problem. Or you may know and understand the Physics but lose marks because you have not properly answered the particular exam question that was asked.

These are different failure modes.

Let the Questions Tell You What You Need to Learn

Once you have been taught a topic, one of the most useful things you can do is start answering questions on it.

This is where questions become much more than a way of checking whether you have revised. They show you what you can (and cannot) actually do.

Suppose, for example, that a question depends on knowing that, impulse is equal to change in momentum, and you do not know that. That is Physics you need to learn. If you do not remember that, kinetic energy is not conserved in an inelastic collision, again, you have found a hole in your Physics knowledge. If a situation involves constant velocity, and you fail to recognise that the forces must therefore be in equilibrium, that piece of Physics is not sufficiently secure.

But sometimes you know all the Physics in the question and still cannot answer it.

Knowing the Physics Is Not Enough

A difficult Physics problem does not necessarily present you with the equation you need and the numbers to put into it.

Sometimes you have to work out a route.

You may have an equation containing a quantity you have not been given. You therefore need to find another equation that contains that quantity and substitute it. That second equation may introduce another unwanted quantity, which then has to be eliminated.

Example

Sometimes the equation you need does not exist on the data sheet at all!

You have to construct it from what is happening.

Consider two pendulums with slightly different periods and a question asking when they will next be in phase (swinging together, in time). There is no equation on the data sheet that applies to this situation. You have to think about what the situation means, put variables and numbers to it and construct the relationship yourself.

Example

Once you have constructed the equation, the mathematics may be straightforward.

The hard bit is the thinking. The example above is a genuine A level Physics question, yet the method is not a worked example in any Physics text book I’ve seen (except this one now :)

How do I think about this problem? What am I trying to find? What clues have I been given? Which relationships might be useful? What have I got to get rid of? Can I substitute for this quantity using another equation?

That is problem solving.

And, to get good at it, problem solving has to be practised.

What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do

When you watch an experienced Physics teacher solve a problem, it can look remarkably easy.

They notice a clue and immediately understand its significance. They select an equation. They see an unwanted variable and look for another relationship that will eliminate it. They construct a route through the problem, apparently without having to think very hard about what they are doing.

But those thought processes have been practised for years (sometimes a quarter of a century or more 🙄 )

A student studying A-Level Physics has been doing this for less than two.

The way to develop those thinking pathways is to practise using them yourself. At first, that means doing the thinking slowly and consciously. You need to notice the mechanisms you are going through in your head while you try to find an answer.

Look for the clues.

Look at the equations.

Ask what (variables) you need to get rid of.

Work out whether you can substitute one relationship into another.

If there is no ready-made equation, think about what is physically happening and whether you can construct the relationship from first principles.

This is effortful. It requires concentration, and it can be frustratingly slow.

That is the difficult part you have to practise.

Why It Feels So Effortful

There is a reason this sort of problem-solving places such a heavy demand on your thinking.

Working memory is limited. You cannot consciously hold and manipulate an unlimited number of separate pieces of information at the same time.

A more complicated Physics problem may require you to keep track of several quantities, understand the physical situation, consider more than one equation and decide how the different pieces fit together. Even when you understand all the individual Physics principles involved, using those ideas simultaneously can place a substantial demand on your working memory.

That demand is known as cognitive load.

Some of it comes from the inherent complexity of the problem itself. Several ideas or variables may genuinely have to be considered together. Some cognitive load can also come from distractions that have nothing useful to do with the Physics. Interruptions, checking your phone or continually switching your attention, uses mental resources that could otherwise be available for the problem.

Removing those distractions does not make the Physics easier. It simply leaves more of your available attention for the thinking you are trying to do.

Practice Changes What You Have to Think About

Practice does not simply make you faster at doing exactly the same mental task.

It changes how much of the task requires conscious attention.

When you first encounter something, you may have to think about each part separately. With experience, familiar relationships and patterns become established in long-term memory and can be recognised without having to reconstruct every part consciously each time.

If you encounter density in a problem, for example, you may initially have to stop and think about what density means, remember the equation, identify the symbols and decide whether the relationship is useful.

With sufficient familiarity, the connection between density, mass and volume can become immediate.

ρ=m/V density = mass / Volume

You now have more mental capacity available for the difficult part of the problem, for example substituting the formula for the volume of a sphere in for V, to work out the density of a spherical object.

Volume of a sphere = (4/3)πr^3 So ρ=m/(4/3)πr^3

The equation produced is NOT on any data sheet, nevertheless reasonably frequently needs to be used to solve an A level Physics problem.

This immediate recognition (instead of effortful thinking) is the transition described by Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”. Slow thinking is deliberate and requires concentration and effort. It is tiring and frustrating. Fast thinking is much more automatic, things just ‘come to you’..

When you are learning to solve Physics problems, much of the process initially belongs in the slow category. You consciously search for clues, think about equations, decide which quantity needs to be eliminated and work out a possible route.

With repeated practice, some of those processes become more automatic.

That does not mean difficult Physics problems stop requiring thought. It means that fewer of the routine parts require your conscious attention, leaving more capacity for the genuinely difficult thinking, higher level, creative thinking. (Don’t let anyone tell you that science is not creative).

Learning to Drive

What?! What has learning to drive got to do with it?

There are lots of things to think about when learning to drive. You have to use the pedals, change gear, steer, look in the mirrors, signal, judge your road position, observe other road users and decide what to do next.

None of those individual actions are difficult. The difficulty is doing all of them together.

At first, many of those actions require conscious thought – slow thinking. After sufficient practice, you stop consciously issuing yourself an instruction for every movement. Someone steps in front of your car and your feet move onto the brake and clutch, without your permission, or decision. This is fast thinking. In truth, fast thinking requires no real thought.

Parts of the task of driving have become automatic, leaving your conscious attention available for what is happening around you.

Physics problem-solving can develop in the same way.

An experienced Physics teacher may automatically start looking for clues, equations and quantities that need to be eliminated because they have been doing this for decades. A student has not yet had that practice.

The answer is not simply to watch the experienced person do it.

You have to practise doing it yourself.

Watching Is Not the Same as Doing

It is very easy to watch somebody else solve a Physics problem.

Once somebody has shown you the route, each step can appear perfectly reasonable. You can follow their explanation and understand why they did what they did.

But you did not find the route. They did.

You cannot learn to drive just from watching someone else drive.

If you want to become better at solving problems, you have to solve problems yourself. Only then do you discover where your own thinking stalls, encounters road-blocks, dead ends, requires backtracking or stops completely. (So many driving references! Very pleasing :)

That is why attempting the question first yourself, before going through it with a teacher or tutor, matters so much. Going through a question with your teacher, that you could already do, wastes your time (and theirs). Watching somebody solve a question before you have tried it yourself also removes the very piece of thinking you need to practise.

YOU HAVE TO DO THE PROBLEMS YOURSELF.

Why Rewriting Notes is Busy Work

You know the scenario – It’s Sunday night and you’ve got a Physics test on Monday. You know you should do some Physics. Your mum says – “Go and spend an hour revising and then go to bed – it’ll be better if you are well rested for your test” (all of which is true, you’ve got a good mum if you’ve ever heard this). So you go to your room and you think about what to do. “I can’t do questions until I’ve revised the whole topic” you reason with yourself. I’m going to go through everything first. So you start reading your text book, or writing notes on your notes, congratulating yourself on how diligent and hard-working you are being.

Mum pops her head in “How are you getting on love?”

“Look at all this revision I’ve done, mum!” you say, waving a sheaf of paper as proof.

“Well done, don’t stay up too late”

Conversations like this take place in homes countrywide. You’ve done your revision, you should be alright in the test, right?

Wrong! The test is sent from the devil, the questions were impossible, “Physics is so hard, mum”.

The thing is, you’ve put lots of effort into something which is unlikely to help on its own (unless you have not ever learned the Physics in the first place).

The thing is, rewriting notes feels like work. Watching walk-through videos do too. Creating flashcards, same.

They take time, feel productive and so are reassuringly comfortable. But if most of what you are doing is relearning Physics you already know. Most of that time, is practising stuff you can already do. None of these things give you practice in the ONLY THING THAT SCORES MARKS, answering A level Physics questions for yourself.

Rewriting notes, watching videos, creating flashcards is busy work.

(Don’t get me wrong – all those things have their place, when learning Physics in the first place, just not when preparing for a test).

The more useful question is not, What topic should I revise? It is, What can I not do?

Attempting proper A level questions help you answer that. They force you to use the Physics rather than simply look at it, and when you cannot answer a question that exposes something that you do NOT know. Go and learn THAT.

Work on What You Cannot Do

An Olympic athlete does not spend most of their training time practising the things they can already do well. If they are great at the blistering sprint finish, you will find them perfecting their start.

The British Olympic rowing team led by Sir Steven Regrave, that had so much success between 1984 and 2000, had a philosophy when training. “Will it make the boat go faster?” Everything was seen through that lens.

Shall I have a piece of chocolate cake? “Will it make the boat go faster?”

Shall we go out to celebrate our success so far? “Will it make the boat go faster?”

Shall I stay up late to watch this movie? “Will it make the boat go faster?”

Shall I do another rep set at the gym? “Will it make the boat go faster?”

Shall we do team building exercises? “Will it make the boat go faster?”

The same principle applies here. If you want to improve at A-Level Physics, you need to spend your time on the things that are currently costing you marks. “Will this improve my marks?”

That might be Physics knowledge. (Especially when you first are learning topics)

It might be problem solving.

It might be an exam technique.

The important thing is to identify “what will improve my marks”.

Doing questions is therefore not enough on its own. You have to do them, mark them, identify what went wrong and then fix the hole in your knowledge.

The fixing of the hole can be surprisingly tricky! It requires that you can figure out if the lost marks were due to lack of Physics, lack of exam techniques, or both. Many students do lots of past papers (every Physics teacher tells their students to do them), but only a few use them effectively to find out what they don’t know and then fix the hole each time.

Fixing the hole is the missing step for many students. Doing past papers is much less effective if you skip this step!

Physics students are ideally placed to get good at this sort of analysis of their own performance. Physics students are highly logical and will have no trouble counting how many “explain” questions they dropped marks on, once they realise they need to do that. And then drawing the conclusion, that they perhaps need to learn how to answer explain questions.

Learning How Exam Questions Work

There is another part of this process, because A-Level Physics students are not simply learning Physics and learning to solve calculations.

They are also learning how to answer (wordy) exam questions.

You need to notice command words. You need to interpret what the question is actually asking. You need to recognise the significance of the number of marks available and learn how different types of written answer need to be structured.

A student can understand the underlying Physics and still lose marks because they have not done this successfully.

This is why a disappointing mark does not automatically mean that you should go back and revise the entire topic again.

Sometimes you should. The question may have exposed Physics that you have forgotten, misunderstood, missed or never properly learned.

But sometimes you know the Physics but cannot apply it.

Sometimes you can apply the Physics but have not answered the exam question properly.

You need to diagnose the problem before you decide how to fix it.

Why Papers Become So Important

As you progress through A-Level Physics, papers become increasingly useful.

Early in the course, you will not have covered enough content to complete a full A-Level paper, so topic questions or AS papers (for the second half of year 12) can be more appropriate. As more of the course has been taught, however, complete papers become possible (from autumn half term in year 13).

At first, reviewing a paper can take a long time because there may be many things to fix. A paper from a student working at a lower grade can provide several sessions worth of work.

As the student improves, there are fewer mistakes to investigate. At A-grade level, properly reviewing a paper may take about an hour.

That means the rate you do papers, increases as you improve.

You still have to analyse and use what each paper reveals.

The Learning Loop

The process is straightforward:

1. Do a paper and mark it.

2. For every question that did not achieve full marks, identify exactly what is missing — Physics understanding or exam technique or both.

3. Fix the hole in knowledge.

Then repeat the process.

The principle applies when the problem exposed is your ability to find the route through a question (this is an exam technique, problem-solving). Go to the chapter called “Problem Solving Exposed”

The principle applies when the problem exposed is your ability to structure your answer to “explain” questions (this is an exam technique, command word scaffolds). Go to the chapter called “Command Word Scaffolds”

The principle applies when the problem is your ability to do photoelectric effect questions (this is a physics problem). Go to your physics text book and look up just the very specific bits of the photoelectric effect which allow you to understand both the question and mark scheme.

This gives your revision a direction.

Instead of deciding in advance that you are going to spend three hours rewriting everything you know about electric fields or producing flashcards on gravitational fields, you allow your performance on questions to tell you what needs attention.

You spend your time fixing what is actually wrong. The next time you meet a question “like that” you will score more marks.

The Difficult Bit Is Supposed to Be Difficult

There is, however, an uncomfortable consequence to all of this.

The work you most need to do is often the work that feels least pleasant.

Working through a problem when you cannot see the route is uncomfortable. Attempting questions that expose things you cannot do, is less reassuring than revising material you already understand. Finding mistakes and returning to them requires resilience and MUCH more effort than doing something familiar.

The sort of practice that develops problem solving is slow and thoughtful. You have to work out the mechanisms you are going through in your head, notice the route and practise the difficult thinking.

The examples described in The Talent Code illustrate this idea. A pianist does not learn a difficult piece by immediately playing it at full speed. The movements are practised slowly and repeatedly. Chords, scales and familiar runs are practised over and over, until the pianist no longer has to think consciously about where every finger needs to go.

The same principle can be seen in practising a football skill or a golf swing. The movement is repeated slowly and thoughtfully before it can be performed quickly.

The difficulty is part of the process.

But knowing that does not make the difficult bit pleasant.

You still have to keep doing it.

Staying With the Difficult Part

Psychologist Angela Duckworth has studied what characteristics of learners predict success. You can find her Ted Talk here: https://tedtalks.social/grit

The best predictor of success is not IQ, it is not natural talent, it is not athleticism, it is not social intelligence, it is not good health nor good looks...

The thing all truly successful people have is...

GRIT

Duckworth defines grit as passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. She describes it as stamina: sticking with your future, day in and day out, not simply for a week or a month, but for years.

Success is not reserved for people who find everything easy from the beginning or who appear naturally talented. People who struggle initially or find learning difficult succeed if they continue working towards their goal. You need to have a growth mindset. You need to believe that failure is not a permanent condition. If you do believe you can change the outcome by keeping at something, you are likely to be right.

For an A-Level Physics student, that means continuing to practise, returning to challenging material, identifying weaknesses and strengthening them. It means repeatedly attempting questions, learning from what went wrong and improving the way you answer them.

These are not things you do once.

You do them over and over and over again.

Progress Accumulates

Improvement does not have to arrive as one dramatic breakthrough.

You attempt a difficult question and cannot do it. You work out what was missing and learn that.

You encounter another problem and cannot find the route. You examine the solution, understand what you failed to recognise ,and try again.

You lose marks because of the way you structured an answer. You identify the problem and practise that exam technique.

None of those individual moments necessarily feels transformative.

But, if you keep going...

Over time, the Physics you have learned becomes more secure. Your experience of problems grows. You become more familiar with the structures of exam questions and improve the techniques you use to answer them.

The slow, effortful thinking begins, through practice, to become more automatic.

Long-term persistence allows those individual improvements to accumulate.

So, How Should You Revise?

First, learn the Physics. Then use it.

Do questions. Attempt them yourself before asking for help. Mark them and look carefully at every place where you lost marks.

Work out what actually went wrong.

If there is Physics you do not know, learn it.

If you know the Physics but could not work out how to use it, practise the problem solving. Look at the route. Look for the clues. Think about the equations. Ask what needs to be eliminated and how the relationships fit together.

If the problem is the way you answered the exam question, identify the command word scaffold you needed and practise it.

Rinse and repeat. This is why “The Learning Loop” is a loop – you loop back to the beginning!

The process is effortful because the thinking you are trying to improve is difficult. With enough practice, some of those processes become more automatic, freeing your attention for the genuinely difficult parts of the next problem.

But you have to stay with the process for long enough for that to happen.

You learn the Physics. You use questions to discover what you cannot yet do. You fix the holes in your knowledge (Physics or exam techniques). You practise the difficult thinking until more of it becomes automatic.

Then you do it again.