It turns out there is actually an answer to this question, and it’s “15 minutes”. Here is my evidence:
I looked at 6448 homework assignments that had been completed on (more…)
Yacapaca
Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
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Dear Nicky MorganMay I add my voice to the many congratulating you on your promotion to Education Minister.
I would like to draw your attention to an unfortunate, and probably unintended, consequence of the disapplication of National Curriculum Levels by your predecessor.
The NC Levels are a national system of criterion referencing that gives English education a significant strategic advantage. The principles are (more…)
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If you look in your gradebook for any given student set, you will see that all the results are reported in the grade scheme you chose for that set. It’s easy to take that for granted and not think about how it is achieved – at least I hope it is, because we have worked hard to make the enormous complexity of that task invisible to casual users.Although teachers very rarely challenge the accuracy of Yacapaca results, I do occasionally get asked about their (more…)
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Checkbox questions (aka “choose-n”) are our second most-popular question type. They are simple and versatile, and you can often replace a whole list of choose-1 questions with a simple choose-n. They also contain a few booby-traps for the (more…)
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When writing any part of a question, please think about timeframe, and the student’s perception of time. In the case of a feedback statement, you have perhaps 10-20s during which the student can remain focused on the current question and the issue of “why did I just get that wrong”?In this time, you can hit them with one boldly-presented point, and there is a good chance it will sink right into their brain. At this point, students will not pause to read a discursive argument, nor will they follow a link, or even note it down for future reference.
The place to put more detailed arguments (your own or links to resources elsewhere) is into a reference sheet that can be downloaded and studied between the first and second quiz runs. You could attach this file to the quiz where students can download it directly, or to the course, where the teacher can control exactly when it is seen by students.
Yacapaca 