Luke Whiting, Head of Science at Carre’s Grammar School in Lincolnshire, uses Educake to create consistent homework routines that benefit students without adding to his department’s workload.
Why use Educake?
Four years ago, we had a new member of staff who had used it at her previous school and told us how fantastic it was. To be honest, I was hesitant at first, since school budgets are tight, but I found that we’d be saving a lot of money compared to the other platforms that we might have paid for. It was a lot easier to use than those alternatives, and I’m very pleased that I took the plunge and went for it in the end.
It’s a great way to set homework consistently that doesn’t add to your workload and allows you to measure progress whilst also encouraging your students to be more responsible for their own learning.
Building consistency in homework
One of the things that came out of our last Ofsted report was a lack of consistency around science homework in some places. As a leader, Educake allows me to ensure that we’re all setting homework on a weekly basis. The heads of each science can decide what that is, but it just means we get that consistency. Every student gets the same deal, and I can easily see who’s done what and keep an eye on things.
If we didn’t have Educake, we wouldn’t have that same consistency of setting high-quality homework. To do all that on our own would be a huge demand on my time and the time of my department, and it just wouldn’t be sustainable.
Improving homework completion rates
Homework completion has gone way up since we started using Educake. One reason is that the students get on well with it. It’s user-friendly, and when they get a question wrong, it provides them with feedback and then allows them to move on to the next thing.
Another key factor is how easy it is to monitor homework completion. At our school, the first time students don’t complete their homework, they get a warning, and then every time after that they get an after-school detention. We found before we started using Educake, students would just rack up all these afterschool detentions, sometimes to the point where there wasn’t even enough time left in the year to complete them.
Now, if they don’t do their homework, we can clearly see this in Educake and send an email straight to parents to say that they have to complete it before a certain time in order to avoid a sanction. This has dramatically improved the homework completion rates and reduced the number of sanctions.
Boosting knowledge retrieval
In science, there’s so much content, and having a secure knowledge base is crucial. I think Educake is great for retrieval, getting the students to revisit content independently, making sure that they have those basic facts in their long-term memory. It allows you to embed that retrieval practice over a long period of time, leaving us free to explore those concepts in more depth during lessons.
I ask students to repeat an Educake quiz until they reach a score of 70%. If we’re doing a test in a lesson, we might ask them in the first 15 minutes to set themselves some quizzes on that topic or go back and redo some of their previous homework before they take the test. When it comes to revision, it’s really easy for them to look at previous results and say, “I only got 40% on that one, so it’s worth redoing,” which is quite nice.
Monitoring student progress
On the quiz results page, you can sort the results by how well they did on each question, which means that you can easily give whole-class feedback in a lesson and really target those questions that the most students got wrong.
Another thing I’ve found useful is national averages. So you can see how our students are doing compared to students around the country. For example, I might see a question that only 20% of my class got right, but actually, only 10% of the country knew the answer, so that gives you a handy benchmark.
Conclusion
What I find most useful of all is getting students to look at their own progress in each topic. Educake can point them in the direction of where they need to do some more work by providing them with the necessary tools, e.g. the revision slides, the set-yourself-quizzes and the revision wizard. That’s the biggest win in terms of monitoring, because it puts the onus on the student, and Educake allows that to happen without too much intervention from teachers.
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