Practice Distribution

Advisory information for teachers that use Tassomai

If you are a teacher reading this page, chances are that you had an email alert that a student was flagged for poor practice distribution.

The first thing to tell you is that it’s common, and that this individual named in your report is likely to be one of many. The second thing to tell you is that this is not terrible news—it does at least tell you that this student is engaged in doing some practice homework on Tassomai. Anything that they do on the app is going to be better than nothing, and probably more useful than alternatives…. 

….but, if they’re flagged for this issue, it would indicate that they are getting far less benefit from Tassomai than they could—or should.

Our idea in drawing teachers’ attention to this issue is to work with you to gently improve implementation and usage. Over time, if you reinforce these messages, you should see a far greater impact on student knowledge, understanding, confidence and attainment.

Practice Distribution - What It Means

Our alert indicator is triggered by any student who, during the past week, had one very busy day (where they completed more than 2 full daily goals toward a subject’s weekly target), and otherwise had completed no full daily goals on the remaining six days.

What this means in essence is that it’s likely the student is doing most of (or all of) their weekly Tassomai homework for this subject in a single sitting, and doing very little Tassomai practice for the rest of the week.

Is this a problem?

This is what we would term as a ‘nice problem to have’ - your student is doing their homework… but they’re doing it in the least beneficial way possible. If they distributed their practice by completing their weekly goal over four discrete days (or more) then they would learn more efficiently and retain knowledge more easily to further scaffold their learning through the year.

Why is distributed practice better?

Tassomai’s algorithms are all designed and optimised for pedagogical processes that are long- recognised as the most effective learning methods: deliberate practice in spaced and interleaved quizzes with instant feedback and adaptation. If a student does a week’s work in one go, the algorithm will do its best to compensate, but it severely reduces the efficacy.

How do you spot this (beyond the student we flagged to you)?

Logging in to your dashboard and viewing any class, you will see green circles indicating daily goal completion on the individual days of any given week (along with a counter). You should ideally see many green ticks (showing a completed goal) for each student across the week.

You want the “Weekly Goal” completion to be at 100%, but that the number of Daily Goals in the counter column adjacent to be 3, 4 or more… if it’s 1 or 2, then it’s time to have a word.

What to tell students with poor practice distribution

Our advice would be to try the following messages:

1. It’s less work to do your weekly goal over multiple days. Each day you complete your daily goal, you get a streak discount. Coming back over consecutive days you’ll find that you have less to do each time for the same overall homework credit. This is because the value of the regular practice is greater, so you don’t have to do so much. If you leave it for several days, your discount disappears;

2. Set yourself a daily reminder or plan always to do it at the same time and place each day. The power of ‘atomic habits’, marginal gains etc…. this is what Tassomai’s ‘little and often’ approach was built towards from the outset;

3. You will find Tassomai easier to do well if you spread your work - not only because the workload becomes less, but also because you start to build much stronger memory of the material over time;

4. Variations on the “it’s your own time you’re wasting” theme - if students are just spamming their homework to get it all done in one go, it’s not only taking longer than it should, but it’s of less value to them (especially if they are putting less care into it).

BONUS TIP - and a really powerful message to reinforce with all students regardless of practice distribution….

If, when you do your Tassomai quizzes, you take care to get one more question right per quiz and therefore hit your accuracy target, you halve the time it takes to complete your homework. A tiny extra effort means half the work.

How can you monitor this better?

We recommend you log in to your teacher dashboard every day that you’re at school. Each lesson you teach, just quickly click on the relevant class view at some point - it takes seconds - and look at who has good practice distribution and praise their efforts… Likewise, by clicking on the column header for individual days, you can sort by who did their daily homework yesterday (and who didn’t) for some gentle nudges.

What’s in it for me?

We have seen—time and time again, over many years’ data—classes with this kind of implementation get better outcomes (often by several grades)... but also the work to teach the syllabus as you go along becomes far easier if all students are engaged in the optimal kind of practice.

Beyond this, your intervention data, which you can see in the Understanding grid (aka the DOTS) will be far more accurate, informative and up-to-date. Having your students use Tassomai ‘properly’ means you can be more informed about who needs help and which topics could do with intervention such as Class Tasks or reteaching.

Also, your classes will suddenly be top of the league in the school leaderboards if you care about such things ;-)

You can find more advice and tips for Tassomai teachers on the Teacher Hub.