ClassCoach’s short cycle to better teaching

Everything you read will tell you that short cycle data, the assessment of students’ progress in close to real time, is the best way to improve results; you get to see where each student is after every lesson and adjust teaching on the fly.

The problem is that gathering and assessing the data takes a lot of time and effort. For time-poor teachers accessing short cycle data required a trade-off between creating engaging lessons or gathering information on how students were progressing.

Simon Free from the online education and tutoring company ClassCoach says, “There’s a very limited number of companies that provide short cycle data to schools, and short cycle data is what you need to improve student results.

"For a teacher to create, then have students complete an assessment then go back and mark it, analyse it and then provide individual feedback to every single student would take hours.”

As part of its service ClassCoach has developed thousands of quizzes and an efficient data gathering and analysis system to assess how its users are faring. It seemed logical to make that same technology available to schools, paving the way for ClassCoach School Platform.

Free says ClassCoach School Platform collects and presents short cycle data instantly through online dashboards and there are over 14,000 online questions to complete aligned to the National Curriculum.

The ClassCoach School Platform is available for Maths grades 5–11 (3–4 and 12 will be ready for Term 2).

“The teacher can teach, for example, Year 7 integers, then the students can do a quiz at the back of the classroom, instead of going to a text book they would go to ClassCoach, once they’ve done that the teacher can see all their results on the MyCoach dashboard and observe the student’s performance or see how a whole class has performed and focus their teaching accordingly. Students have access to their data as does the parent.”

If the student uses ClassCoach’s tutoring service their data can be accessed by the company’s tutors during an after school session and areas that need more work can be revisited.

“The intention is to create vertical alignment from the classroom to the home and then back again,” Free says.

The time it takes for students to complete the quizzes varies according to year level and ability, typically a Year 7 student would complete a quiz in 10 to 15 minutes while a Year 11 or 12 student would be looking at around 25 to 30 minutes per quiz.

“We track the amount of time that a student takes to complete a quiz, if a student gets 0% and takes 0 seconds to complete the quiz the teacher can see that and know that they didn’t try very hard, if a student took nine minutes and got 100% it’s an indication that the student needs to be extended,” Free says.

ClassCoach can also help with setting and checking homework, it analyses the students’ results from every Chapter Test and assigns homework tasks based on the students’ results.

The software is designed to be very easy to use and doesn’t require any training. It will take ClassCoach about a day to enroll all the teachers and students into the system and get it running in a school.

ClassCoach is also talking with several LMS providers about integrating with their systems, Free says it will be an issue of making data generated available to the LMS.

“It’s all extractable data so the head of department has their own dashboard and can extract all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet. If you have Excel boffins who love to play with data they can cut it in any of a million ways.

“Currently we take eight points of data from every question that the student complete and our intention is get to 100 points of data from every question which will allow us to get even more targeted as we build the platform, but it’s always going to be about seeing where the student is and improving their results,” Free says.

ClassCoach is currently looking to work with schools across Australia to improve student results through their integrated approach to online learning. 

Schools wanting to find out more about ClassCoach can book an in school presentation or free trial by going to classcoach.com.au/schools or by emailing [email protected].