Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • This is the power of a little tin badge

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    I got this email yesterday from Dr. Mandy Heddle, who teaches in a high-achieving British International School. I have permission to share the story, but I’ll not name the school so as to stay out of their Google searches.

    I wanted to share with you that I have a student I have mentored since she was 11 and she is now 17. She is off the charts smart, even for our school, and I can’t wait to see what she does with her life. Very quirky and gothic with a very dark sense of humour. She has won countless awards and accolades, from poetry to mathematics and she could not care less. She slouches up to the stage each assembly and mumbles her thanks. However, I have never seen her utter amazement and joy when her Yacapaca badge arrived in the mail. She was stunned that it actually came and she couldn’t be more proud. It made her week. So thank you so much for such a great programme that makes my students so happy.

    Of course I was grinning from ear to ear after reading this. Stories like this are absolutely what make it all worthwhile.

  • No more “failed quiz attempts”

    When we first started running Yacapaca, students discovered that they could use the Back button to try each question as many times as there were options, and thus gain a perfect score without needing to pay any attention to the content. This resulted in an invalid assessment and zero learning, so we had to block it. The only way to do this at the time was to program Flash so that the Back button would exit the quiz altogether.

    This in turn created a need for a feature by which the teacher could ‘forgive’ this behaviour and (more…)

  • John Hattie’s top three influences on student achievement: you already do at least two of them.

    John Hattie is the educational guru du jour, and with good reason. He has the research on his side. If you have not seen his graded list of 138 Influences on Student Achievement, the whole thing is here. Expect to find his Visible Learning on your CPD menu for the coming year.

    I want to focus on just the top three.

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    I will be the first to admit that Piaget and Yacapaca don’t really have a lot to say to each other, but let’s look at the other two.

    Self-reported grades

    Hattie says…

    Self reported grades comes out at the top of all influences. Children are the most (more…)

  • Copyright misconceptions

    copyright distortSometimes kids get hold of the wrong end of the stick en masse. A great example is copyright – the right to copy. A quick sampling of students’ peer feedback statements reveals that approx. 50% of statements that mention copyright see it as some kind of a crime. Here’s a quick sampler of the 20+ most recent examples:

    1. It is copying someones work and is illegal and this is called copyright.
    2. Because copyright is an act of (more…)

  • Assessment is sampling, and this has consequences

    The structure of knowledge is a complex thing. Very rarely can it be codified as a simple set of statements. There are facts, yes, but also links, opinions, metaphors, context, images (both mental and physical) and much more to boot. Exam boards put enormous effort into trying to distinguish between those students who have ‘got it’ and those who have not. As a teacher setting a low-stakes assessment, you find yourself trying to second-guess the exam board.

    So how does the exam board go about it? They cannot test everything that has been learned over the course of two years, so they sample. They ask a range of questions that taken together should give a reasonably accurate view of the overall attainment of the student.

    The same is true when you set a low-stakes assessment such as an end-of-topic quiz. Even if you (more…)