You may notice we have made a change to the way we calculate daily goals… our new system is designed to credit students for every bit of work that they do while encouraging them still to spread their work through the week and work to a high standard. The information below should hopefully explain the change, but if you have any questions or feedback, please get in touch and I will be happy to discuss with you and your team.

Murray

What’s Changed?

Tassomai has made a small but important change to the way we count students’ work on Tassomai and the way that it is credited to their Daily Goal count. As of this month, any points scored by a student through their quizzing on Tassomai counts towards their daily goal score, whether that is a small part of the goal or work done in excess of their target.

The number of Daily Goals completed during any time period will also show a sum of all this work done.

The result of this is that students who miss days can catch up by doing extra, and students who spread their work over more days can have this work contribute to their homework total.

Why This Change?

By listening to students, parents and teachers, we came to the conclusion that in many, many cases, students were doing work for which they were not credited (if, for example, they fell just short of the target on a day, that work would not count as a daily goal). In turn, teachers and parents were seeing reports of underperforming students even if they were in fact doing great work.

A second problem was that students, realising that they had missed some days, would decide that they had no chance of making their daily goal target for the week and so would give up altogether.

This new system reflects the work done more truly and allows students to put in the extra effort to catch up if they need to do so. Indeed, many schools attempting to work around the issues in the old system were not using the daily goal indicator for these reasons, instead telling students to hit a certain points target or questions attempted target each week. We hope that this adjustment to the daily goal criteria will make things clearer and easier to implement.

In most respects, this new system is a fairer and truer reflection of work done for all, and aims to encourage students to engage more positively with the platform.

What about Tassomai’s “little-and-often” approach?

We built our whole program around healthy retrieval practice patterns spaced over regular practice sessions - and yes, it is now possible for students to do all their work at once. But we took the view, from a great deal of feedback, that by forcing students to spread their work and otherwise punishing them by giving them a “zero” for doing anything less than the full DG, we were making a system that was too harsh and inequitable.

Even if students do their week’s work in a shorter session, our algorithm is still making sure that the learning is interleaved and that retrieval practice is spaced to ensure knowledge sticks.

Nevertheless, we have introduced other changes that discourage bingeing and guessing, and to incentivise students to spread the work over the week: 

• Students who come back to do their daily goal on consecutive days will find that their overall workload to reach 4 daily goals is far less than that of a student doing it all in one go;

• Students who do extra on one day (towards their bonus goal) will find that they get an extra credit if they come back the following day;

• Students who guess repeatedly will find the negative points get increasingly harsh;

• Students now have a hint button that helps them to avoid guessing - though they still need to remember the hint and answer correctly later to score the point;

• Students who hit their (personalised, differentiated) accuracy target will get extra points reward.

More small changes are likewise on their way over the coming months to nudge students towards better learning habits.

What should I tell students and colleagues?

We recommend the message remains broadly the same: 

• that students should be doing 4 daily goals per week;

• that spreading the work over four or more days is better educationally, but also easier and less work for the student;

• that if they miss a day, or if they only do part of their daily goal on a certain day, they can now catch up and all the work they do on Tassomai now counts, where previously it did not;

• that using Tassomai with care, accuracy, and in a little-and-often approach remains the best and most efficient way for students to use the program and practise their knowledge.