Gareth Jones

Today marks two weeks since Learnalot‘s launch and during that time almost 40 UK schools have signed up for trials. While 40 schools only represents a fraction of the total number of schools in the country, it is already interesting to read the wide range of feedback that we’re getting from teachers who are using our software.

Most of the feedback we’re receiving is incredibly positive. The quality of the software, the range of scenarios, the graphics, the sound, the supporting documents – everything is going down well. There is a discrepancy in one area of feedback however, and that is the difficulty of the questions.

While most schools seem to feel that we’ve pitched the questions at just the right level, some have asked us to make the resources harder and one has even asked us to make it possible to disable the hints function and force the students to work it all out for themselves without any help whatsoever. Brutal!

On the other hand, we’ve also received feedback that the questions in what is actually our easiest resource – Britain’s Got Power – are too difficult and that their students are struggling with it.

While I have no intention of naming individual schools, teachers or students, the pattern in the feedback is certainly worth discussing and exploring in more detail so that we can better understand exactly why this discrepancy exists and whether there is anything that we, as an educational software provider, should do about it.

Although the data and questions within the activities are randomised, they’re always within sensible parameters and as such the range of difficulty for each student can, I think, be considered negligible and therefore be rounded up to a constant. So if the difficulty of the software is a constant, why are we being asked by some teachers to make the software easier and to make it harder by others?

There could be a variance in the abilities of students, of course. While some students excel in maths, others excel in other areas and can find maths problematic. But such variance would be extraordinary on a school level and is much more likely to exist on an individual level with every school in the land being home to students on either end of the spectrum.

Could it be student age – and by loose extension, ability and/or experience? Taking extreme cases, one school that thinks we have it just right has students a full year younger than another school that thinks we need to make the resources easier, and although this is an extreme in one direction, there are no extremes in the opposite direction as would be expected so we can probably discount student age as a plausible factor as well.

What about student sex? Whilst the school that most strongly believes that our resources are too difficult is a girls’ school, other girls’ schools have not said anything at all about the resources being too difficult. Similarly, the schools who want us to make the resources more difficult are made up of both boys and girls in fairly equal measure, and still more schools that are made up of mostly boys have said that they feel the difficulty is spot-on as it is.

Just to remove all doubt that student sex is not a factor, in a recent study published in Science, Professor Janet Hyde used data from around 7 million US children in 10 US states from grade 2 through to grade 11 and showed that the difference in performance between the two sexes was negligible and that while boys were marginally ahead in some states, girls were marginally ahead in others.

Our own results, though obviously from a much smaller pool, would seem to corroborate this finding as several of the top spots on our leaderboards are occupied by girls. The gender ratio of the schools must therefore be irrelevant when trying to work out the reason for the discrepancy in requests to alter the difficulty.

So again, why are some schools asking us to make the resources easier while others are asking us to make them harder if we can assume that each school on average has students of approximately equal ability?

From what I’ve seen so far, the answer is the teachers themselves.

One school told me that although their students are now doing very well with the resources, this wasn’t always the case. At the beginning the students were struggling and thought the resources were too difficult, but she said this was because they were used to getting their answers on a plate. They weren’t used to having to think about the best way to solve a problem using first principles. They weren’t used to not being given the answers if they didn’t get the question right the first time round. She stayed the course however and since then the students have accepted that they need to do the work themselves, they have embraced the challenge and have excelled in every resource. Those students are now dominating several of the leaderboards and are eagerly awaiting the next resource so that they can continue to flex their mathematical muscles.

On the other side of the scale, another teacher whose students initially struggled with the resources said that they were using another service instead which provided simpler activities, and he reported some of the more difficult questions in our resources as “bugs” that needed fixing.

Intrigued by the difference in approach between these two teachers, I recalled back to when I was at school and what my teacher used to do with us in order to have something to compare against. Indeed, my teacher didn’t use any educational software at all because back then our school had only just migrated from blackboard and chalk to whiteboard and marker pen. The “ICT room” consisted of around 5 computers and was only ever used by students on the “computing” course. In any case, a persistent theme of my maths lessons were that we were told what we had to learn and we practised it until we knew it. There was no such thing as choosing an alternative task that we were happier with because it was less challenging.

Looking again at the contrasting approaches on display here, after discounting every other variable it seems that the teachers themselves are the key factor in why we’re receiving such mixed feedback on the difficulty of the resources. Some teachers are pressing ahead and weaning their students off resources that almost complete themselves and are achieving incredible results in the process, whereas others are seemingly happy to let their students continue with a false sense of achievement with software that doesn’t offer any challenge at all.

While it’s clear that the teaching of maths in the UK is not consistent even from a sample as small as ours (it will be interesting to see what happens when we start looking at hundreds of schools), I think it’s clear which method leads to better performance in students.

So where does this leave Learnalot?

Well, we aren’t going to start developing software that almost completes itself because that’s a pointless exercise.

What we will do instead is continue to challenge and engage our learners and push them to the limits of their abilities because this is how students learn new skills and improve existing ones. We will broaden the range of difficulty exhibited in the resources ever so slightly to make them more inclusive to those who aren’t as strong in maths and more challenging to those who are gifted, and we will continue to do so with scenarios that students find interesting and engaging.

This, I think, is the way to bring out the best in young learners and by building a suite of resources that covers the entire syllabus in this way, I don’t see why we won’t have a significant effect on these learners’ maths skills.

Since the completion of both Name that Note and Name that Note: PRE a while back, these games have been available to play for free on Quak Multimedia’s educational software section. The idea was that people could try the games and get a feel for how they played before deciding if they wanted to buy them for their own music-based website.

Since launch the games have racked up literally thousands of plays between them and although have proven pretty popular among the above-mentioned websites, the logs showed that there was a lot of traffic from certain locations that hinted at the games actually being used for educational purposes rather than as the trials they were meant to be.

I wouldn’t have minded too much if these users were contributing at all to the development of these games by providing us with some feedback, but despite requests, the comments sections have remained empty and we have received no email feedback on these games.

Quak Multimedia doesn’t exist to provide a free service – especially not to people who refuse to contribute anything back – and for providing educators with the necessary tools to help their students perfect their skills I’d have expected some comments and feedback at the very least – or preferably some sales figures that better reflect the usage statistics.

We could have made the games time-limited trials, but doing so would have meant putting more time and effort into developments that are already finished at a time when we are already busy, and all because a minority are happy to abuse good will. It just didn’t seem to be the right thing to do at this time, so instead the games have been removed from the site – but are still available to buy to anyone who wants to support us.

Thanks.