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  • CAA Conference

    I will be at the CAA Conference in Zeist on Monday and (presenting on) Tuesday. If you are there too, give me a shout.

  • The Badge Log

    If your students have enjoyed earning Yacapaca badges, you may need to track exactly who has earned what. There is now a badge log under the More tab. Nothing fancy, but it should meet the need. See yours here.

    Badges have been a runaway success this year, with overwhelmingly positive feedback (such as this story from Patana School) about how they are motivating the students.

  • Are teachers abandoning NC Levels? Research shows the exact opposite.

    One of the great things about running a really big database like Yacapaca is that you get an absolute ton of data to analyse, and you can sometimes give definitive answers to questions other people can only speculate about. The ‘disapplication’ of NC Levels is a case in point.

    Michael Gove told teachers to abandon NC Levels last September. As it happens, we keep a detailed log of the gradescheme applied to each student set within Yacapaca. This morning, I grabbed the last 1000 changes to existing gradeschemes, and ran the numbers.

    NC Levels 2

    Out of 1,000 in total, 446 chose to (more…)

  • Improve comprehension by re-stating ‘not’ questions into positives

    Here is a question from our database, with one of its distractors (incorrect answers), and a feedback statement written by a student:
    Question Distractor Feedback statement written by student
    Which one of the following is not a network topology? Bus Bus is not a network topology.

    Do you see the problem? ‘Bus’ is indeed a network topology. By stating the question in the negative, the distractor becomes a double negative – ‘bus’ is NOT NOT a network topology. And guess wha (more…)