At the start of this half-term I shifted out department homework to using carousel learning. For the uninitiated it is a (for now at least) free platform to enable quizzes with a range of great features to make for effective retrieval homework, an evolution of Adam Boxer’s retrieval roulette.
I say retrieval, of course there is no way of knowing that
pupils are not looking at their notes or googling answers but the effort level
of doing this means I suspect most are generally trying to retrieve. I started
off my briefly explaining the benefits of retrieval which helped with this.
Looking at their answers it does seem they are genuinely trying to remember
answers from memory.
It’s been a real game changer for me and there have been a
number of benefits.
Benefits
1. Spaced practice. When you upload a question bank you can then select random questions from a range of different topics meaning that pupils are regularly retrieving information from topics that were previously learned.
You can specify the topics you want in the quiz to mix this up or the system can set it randomly. You do then need to remember which topics you have previously quizzed (more on this below.)
2. No need to check for completion. Even in normal times, I find the process of checking who has completed homework a real pain in the backside. Now that I am restricted to the front of the classroom that is even worse.
This way there is no doubt that it has been done so it makes sanctioning any non-completion much easier. I am certain it has meant homework completion is increasing as there will have been people previously who were discreetly completing homework as I was going through answers who now have no hiding place.
I can also increase frequency of homework even when there are absences. In the final week, my school has a SRE session when I normally teach my year 11 but I’ve told them there will still be a carousel quiz due for that lesson and I can now enforce this as it is done online.
3. Self-Marking. After pupils complete the quiz, they see the model answer that the teacher has written. This saves a huge amount of time as it means there is no need to mark homework during lessons, a particular benefit this year given what a scarce resource time is.
I've seen other platforms that do this for multiple choice questions but not for free form answers. Whilst I appreciate MCQ have great value to tease out misconceptions, economics has so many definitions that pupils need to understand, I really want them to have to remember and explain their importance from memory with no cues which I can now do without having to spend ages going through them in class.
Before I started, I was concerned that pupils would not mark question properly, but I haven’t found that to be much of a problem. I’ve had pupils who are a bit overly generous when they get an answer half-right but very few who are deliberately mis-marking.
Every few weeks I go through answers to check for this and take appropriate action with pupils’ but it hasn’t been much of a problem. Inevitably there will be some pupils who carefully look at the correct answers and think about where they have gone wrong and some who will take it less seriously but that’s sadly a fact of teaching, it is just that it becomes more apparent now as it’s more visible.
4. Analysing Results
The best part of the website for me is the quick snapshot of how pupils are doing. You can look both at the score of pupils but also of questions to see common areas of difficulty. I don’t look much at the pupil scores (unless to congratulate some who are doing particularly well but I don’t over-do this as to encourage accurate marking I try to emphasise how low-stakes this is) but I really love the chance to see what questions pupils are struggling in.
If this is a simple factual statement pupils are getting wrong (like the definition of economies of scale and or the values for a demand to be inelastic) I will set that as a question in their do now next lesson. The expectation is if they got it wrong and see my correct answer that they should then get it right.
If it is a question that highlights a deeper misunderstanding then I will reteach and assess them on this in class and set a few similar questions again.
I find this works well for all year groups I teach (Y10 – Y13). For KS4 this is now my exclusive homework, for KS5 there is a mixture of this and essays and wider reading with comprehension questions but it is an important part of their homework diet. There are no downsides to using it but a few things to be careful of are:
1. Make sure pupils click submit. I had a few upset pupils in my first detention as many marked their quiz and got a score but didn’t realise they had to click submit, Since then the website has changed and this now appears as ‘marking’ rather than ‘not completed’ so you should know but it is worth emphasising this with pupils. When I showed this to them I wen through a quiz and marking but not clicking ‘submit’ so it is worth going through the whole process.
2. Keeping track of questions already assessed. I typically have around half of the questions on recent learning and half on previous learning but there isn’t a function to tell you what topics or questions have been recently covered. This means if you randomly generate questions it is possible that you will cover the same questions that have been set before.
If you have a large bank of questions this becomes less of a problem. In a perfect world it would be great if there was a function to ask questions that haven’t been asked before or to track how many times different questions had been asked but I’m not sure how feasible that is.
3. Writing the question banks is hard work! I already had self-quizzing sheets for pupils which helped me write questions but it does take a long time. Carousel allows teachers to share question banks but for a more niche subject like economics, I have had to create a lot myself.
One thing this has made me consider though it how to pose challenging questions. When I first started writing these, a lot were definition or factual questions. Whilst these definitively have a place (and I wouldn’t remove these) I am gradually adding more questions to deliberate tackle misconceptions and asking pupils to differentiate between similar topics or find links between topics.
These take time to create but I have found the process of doing this an excellent way to improve my subject knowledge and a nice free bit of CPD. The great thing is that when these questions are created they can be used by everyone in the department and everyone can refine and add to them so it becomes a collaborative process.
I am really pleased with how this is going so far and I’m already starting to see the impact on pupils. I have gone through a lot of trial and error with homework and this is definitely my favourite method! Adam has blogged about how to best use this and I would recommend anyone interested gives it a read and registers.