Our cohort

Our cohort are learners in the long tail of underachievement, they are learners who would be expected to gain below a grade 5 at GCSE, they aren’t learning very well - they continue to fall further and further behind their peers.

Our cohort are learners in the long tail of underachievement, they are learners who would not be expected to gain a grade 4 at GCSE who aren’t learning very well - they continue to fall further and further behind their peers. They often don’t deeply embedding the learning of each lesson instead they quickly forget what they learn. This is a depressing picture for teachers, learners and government.

However the good news is that more sophisticated lesson planning(see plan teaching), together with allocating more lesson time to smart retrieval practice and feedback, can dramatically increase the proportion (and absolute amount) of teaching which becomes deeply embedded learning.

With timely practice we have consistently demonstrated that: once the teacher starts to teach in a memory friendly manner, the teacher will see our cohort’s progress significantly accelerate.

Unless it is done smartly, adding retrieval practice into the mix won’t fix the problem of our cohort. Ad hoc retrieval practice for our cohort feels horrible to the teacher and learner: imagine volunteering to “go through the latest test paper” for 15 minutes every lesson. We know this process knocks learners' confidence, we know teachers don’t have enough time to give learners the feedback they need, and usually learners are not particularly great at waiting until the teacher has time to give their feedback. Ad hoc retrieval practice is not a smart use of lesson time and not a smart use of the learners' limited supply of motivation.

The timely practice app was built to enable the teacher to give smart retrieval practice to each learner in our cohort. It’s smart because retrieval practice is targeted at each learner i.e. personalised, and therefore well timed and it allows feedback to be effective, if it’s required. Hence retrieval practice with timely practice gradually stretches the durability of the recall-ability of new learning, so that the new learning can within a couple of months become firm foundations for more new learning.

It’s important to

schedule a “timely practice” episode every lesson

because the timely practice episode (5-25 minutes) does many valuable time sensitive “jobs” for teacher and learners. These jobs are traditionally hard for the teacher to schedule sufficient time for:

Learners review the teacher’s assessment of their last lesson’s assignment and
- self correct when they can and
- get personalised feedback when they need it and
- complete their new retrieval practice questions.
The teacher has far more time to give personalised feedback to learners because
- learners are independently engaged in completing their new assignment which
- finds existing firm learning foundations and
- efficiently schedules retrieval practice questions which
- embeds all prior learning ever more deeply into long term memory.

In most classrooms, each of these jobs is allocated very little time, yet each is valuable in ensuring that learning doesn’t become forgetting.

See trainLearners (1) and trainLearners (3) for more information on this.