Why a lesson has more than one stage
A good tutor doesn’t just explain a topic and leave. They check you’ve understood it, give you questions to try and go back over whatever you got wrong. A NovaLearn lesson is built the same way.
Each lesson has three stages, Study, Explanation and Testing, followed by Results. Here’s what each one is for, and how the rest of the platform fits around them.
Study: learn the topic
Open a lesson from your course’s Lessons list or the Roadmap. Study is where the teaching is: explanations, key terms, worked examples and diagrams where they help. Each course follows one exam board’s specification, so make sure you’ve picked the one you’re actually taking.
Read with a question in mind. For a Psychology model, ask what it claims and what evidence backs it up. For an Economics diagram, ask what each axis shows and why a curve moves. Stop at the examples and quick checks rather than racing to the bottom of the page.
If a passage doesn’t make sense, select it and ask Nova. Specific questions work best: ‘Why does rehearsal matter in this model?’ gets you further than ‘Explain everything again.’
Explanation: put the idea into your own words
In Explanation, the roles swap and you do the explaining. Nova asks follow-up questions about the lesson, the way a tutor would, to see whether you understand the ideas and how they connect.
Just start with an ordinary sentence. You don’t need to repeat the lesson word for word, but the meaning and the key terms still matter. If you can name the parts of a model but can’t explain what happens between them, that’s exactly the kind of gap this stage is meant to catch.
Read the feedback before moving on. If something important is still fuzzy, go back to that part of Study. Finishing the conversation doesn’t mean the topic is done.
Testing: answer without the explanation beside you
Testing is where you use what you’ve learned. Read what each question is asking, have a proper go on your own, then submit it for marking.
It often shows something the conversation didn’t. You might explain a theory clearly but struggle to apply it to a scenario, or know an equation and still miss a unit conversion. Look at the feedback on each question, not just the overall mark.
Results: decide what to go back over
Results pulls the lesson together and can take you straight back to the section you need. Read the feedback and pick one next step: relearn a definition, fix a line of reasoning, or practise the idea in a new question.
Gaps from your answers are saved in My Mistakes, where you can go through them with Nova. Practice Questions lets you build more questions on the topics you choose. You don’t need to redo a whole lesson because one answer went wrong. Fix the part that needs fixing.
NovaTutor: when you want to talk it through
NovaTutor sits outside the lesson pages and has two modes. In ‘Nova teaches you’, Nova takes you through a topic in small steps and checks you’re following. In ‘You explain it back’, you lead and Nova asks the questions. You can type or use your voice in both.
Use teaching mode when a topic is new or just isn’t landing. Use explain-it-back when you think you know it and want to find out for sure. Not every topic needs the same approach, so pick whichever fits where you’re.
Try a lesson before creating an account
You can start as a guest: browse the subjects and read roughly the first half of any lesson. Guests also get 20 messages with Nova, tutor sessions included, plus 2 practice questions and 4 marked answers. To keep going after that, you’ll be asked to create an account.
Pick a topic you’re studying right now. Read a section, ask Nova the question you actually have, and see whether it helps.