Page Comparison

Mainly because it would take too long and it would be too traumatic for many learners - who have low self esteem in terms of their maths learning.

We ask questions on a few key layers of a topic - which gives us a broad brush stroke picture of the learner’s skills and learning gaps - but only questions at an appropriate level for the learner.

We know that quite often asking one question on a layer is insufficient to find if a layer is secure or not, so we always ask a second question if the learner seems to know the first. (For learners with lots of learning gaps/who rush when answering questions - asking 2 questions on a layer is very necessary - as for up to half of their layers, we will find one question answered correctly and a second not).

Using the information on key layers we ask a question on layers, we call them interesting layers, we think teachers will find this information interesting in order to plan their teaching.

There are some layers which we don’t ask questions on - usually these are layers which include considerable timely practice scaffolding - so the learner is unlikely to have met these type of questions before. After teaching the layer, the scaffolding will be very helpful to the learner, but before teaching the scaffolding is likely to be confusing.

Our auto pre assess process is on our plans to improve soon.

However the data the app collects will provide much better data than the teacher can expect to when using one or two pre assess questions at the start of the lesson because

• we significantly reduce the likelihood of copying,

• answering a question on an assignment is much less stressful than answering a question in a class, where some learners will feel they will be “shown up” so teachers are less likely to see a false negative,

• we ask 2 questions on any layer on different days so teachers are less likely to see a false positive,

• the app collects all the data in an easy to visualise way - so that planning is easy for the teacher and so every learner is likely to be able to learn what they are taught

… and we also ensure that the teacher is unlikely to teach too much to each learner on a topic, so each learner is likely to be able to recall the learning of each lesson, the next lesson, when the retrieval practice will begin to embed the learning deeply into long term memory.