In keeping with the ‘Powering Learning’ theme of BETT 2012, Maths-Whizz, the online suite of services that guarantees raised standards in numeracy for  5 to 13 year-olds, is encouraging visitors to ‘power happiness in numbers’. The award-winning system encompasses online tutoring service Tutoring Plus and the online, teacher-led content library, Teachers’ Resource. Maths-Whizz creates positive learning outcomes by building confidence and encouraging shared, interactive learning at home and in schools. Crucially, progress is measurable, as students are continually assessed. This detailed real-time reporting is very beneficial for schools wishing to access government funding.
Visitors to BETT will be able to experience Maths-Whizz first hand. Demonstrations by practitioners (teachers and non-teachers), using whole-class interactive tools and best practise guidance, will show why Maths-Whizz is proven to raise standards in maths. The newly-launched features of Teachers’ Resource* (v 3.2) and a superb related show offer* complete the Maths-Whizz BETT experience.
Visitors to BETT 2012 are invited to:
•    Meet Whizz Prof, in attendance each day.

There will also be plenty of stickers, pens and other treats for teachers to take away for their school.

•    Take advantage of the  BETT school offer:
In addition, and exclusive to BETT visitors, any school that buys at BETT will be able to buy version 3.2 of BETT award-winning Teachers’ Resource for just £750*.

•    Come to our events:
Daily discussion forum with current teacher and Headteacher Maths-Whizz Users, please follow us  on twitter @whizzprof  for more details.
Educationalists Katie Krais and Lorrae Jaderberg share perspectives on how to raise numeracy standards through after school clubs on Thursday 12th.

Now that we have literally thousands of users, we at Whizz can begin to see the exercises which are more of a struggle than others, and frankly there are exercises we must  improve to ensure  that the children do really understand the learning objective all the time. A  Certain of our tests get failed much more than others which could be about the test or the animation which preceded it as we know, for example, that many children struggle with telling the time on an analog clock. Mine did, how about yours?

Occasionally we find that we have been too hard on our users. In one of our exercises for 7 year olds, we didn’t realise (until the consistently high failure rate convinced us!) that we were expecting them to be familiar with 3x, 4x and 5x number facts when at that age level, the curriculum requires only 2x and 10x knowledge. Hopefully now, many fewer of our children will have to face repeating one of the 7 year old animated exercises over and over again.

Many of the other most highly failed animated exercises are Rapid Recall ones. They are usually fun to do and frankly if they get failed a lot, it’s no bad thing if the child has to do them again. In a few cases, we are going to review the times we allow for the answer to be given. But we don’t want that time to be long enough to use a calculator or to go and find Dad! We’ve got some other ideas up our sleeve for this issue but it would be great to hear some suggestions from our users. So please do let us know what you think.

With tests we know we have to find a balance between going slightly beyond how we have taught the learning objective- without going beyond, you can’t always test whether the point of the exercise has been understood- and taking too big a step. We know we haven’t always got that balance right and are fine tuning where necessary. There’s no sense in having a test which only a tiny minority can pass first time, and condemning children to excessive repeats of the same animation.

In the Parent Dashboard we have through Exercise Preview given parents the possibility of allowing their child to skip repeating an animation but it’s a nuclear option which we would rather never had to be used!

Care to comment on any of these issues? We would love to hear your thoughts!

Alison Gopnik, writing at Slate.com, comments on the increasing tendency to teach pre-school children, rather than allow them to play. She suggests that this approach, at least for the youngest children, might be stifling not just creativity, but the ability to learn, and she cites two new papers that draw from computer science to prove her point.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It’s this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place.

The key seems to be the way children learn about learning. A child will learn about the teaching method in order to understand better how to learn. Two recent papers in the journal Cognition explore the nature of that process by giving groups of children toys with hidden features and starting them off with either an exploratory approach or a taught one.

The understanding is that a purely demonstrative, instructional teacher implicitly conveys the understanding that the student can only learn by doing as she does, following her instruction. Whereas, a teacher who explores with the student (or even no teacher at all) brings with her the belief that experiment and investigation are just as useful as instruction, and that not all knowledge is directed.

Both research groups found that the less-directed students discovered more, and explored for longer. The differences between being instructed and encouraged to explore in both studies were subtle – a teacher might demonstrate an action (or set of actions) that produces a result in a toy and tell children to do likewise, or the teacher might explore the toy to produce an action as if by accident and encourage the children to see what they can find for themselves.

The research Gopnik refers to is new, and devoted to pre-school subjects, so it may be inappropriate to extrapolate this to primary age children. But these findings point to what she describes as a common intuition amongst teachers: that play can be just as powerful a learning tool as instruction if not, at least for the youngest, more so.

So what, if any, conclusions can we draw for the primary and early secondary children who use our online maths tutor Maths-Whizz? The first might be that there is such a thing as too young to study – we tend to discourage parents who want to use Maths-Whizz for their more advanced four year olds.

Second, we built into our maths lessons an implicit understanding of a child’s learning style at different ages. Earlier lessons at ages five and six are more exploratory and playful, and are devoted to the concepts that underpin maths rather than the more ‘math-y’ material in ages seven and up.

Finally, our recommended usage patterns reflect the need for younger children to have a more varied and undirected experience, away from a computer.

Gopnik echoes indirectly the call for creativity in education, given memorably by Sir Ken Robinson at a TED talk some years ago:

…it’s more important than ever to give children’s remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

Maths-Whizz, as numerous awards, hundreds of testimonials, and tens of thousands of online users prove, is a fabulous and enjoyable tool for building numeracy and boosting confidence in maths.

But we know there is always room for play in maths learning and we encourage students to step away from their online tutor now and then. So, how can you encourage your Maths-Whizzers to make the most of their creative instincts? Without second-guessing the results of future research in this field, here’s an informal selection of ideas:

• Explore maths concepts with the Whizz Tools Board (accessible from the bedroom). Play with cards, dice, counters, shapes, number grids and number ‘machines’.
• Ask your child to teach you. This is a great way to encourage students to marshal their knowledge and creatively convey what they know.
• Find maths in the real world. Look for shapes and angles in the house, think about how to estimate the number of leaves on a tree, and make your own graphs and charts.
• Tell stories with maths. Imagine you’re a number or a shape, and describe your day!

With Maths-Whizz, a little play can go a long way!

Policy wonks have found that summer learning loss, an established side-effect of long school holidays, is particularly pronounced in some groups:

…children from the poorest backgrounds suffered most with ‘summer learning loss’ because they were the least likely to practise reading and writing during the six-week break.

The Education Guardian has reported on plans from think-tank The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) to shorten the long summer holidays. This should interest parents from any wealth bracket – without the right attention even the most expensively educated can suffer.

Further to this, long term times might be causing ‘burn out’ in some students.

A co-author of the IPPR study, Sonia Sodha, calls for a five-term system, with two-week breaks between eight-week terms, and a month for summer hols.

Many parents remember their long summer holidays with fondness, even though the original purpose of the long break – to allow children to return to farms for the picking season – has almost entirely been forgotten, certainly in practice.

Margaret Morrissey of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations argues that children may also need “…a chance to recharge their batteries”; but one could well argue that if the terms weren’t so long, children’s batteries wouldn’t need recharging in the first place.

(As of 2010) Former Children’s Minister Kevin Brennan said the IPPR report (which also includes recommendations on increasing the role of play in classes for 5 and 6 year-olds and suggestions that secondary and primary schools employ in-house counsellors or use counselling networks) matches commitments made in the coming ‘Children’s Plan’.

Keeping children constructively entertained over summer is an issue, whether or not the Children’s Plan includes shortening the summer holidays. The finding that unstructured holidays can lead to ‘learning loss’ is still relevant, and is something we recognise. In 2007, Whizz Education launched our Summer Adventure – featuring the Professor lost in the jungle. Students were charged with helping him escape, by solving maths puzzles and playing jungle-themed games.

(a maths puzzle from the 2007 Summer Adventure)

The Summer Adventure was a huge success – Maths-Whizz students at Mead School, Kent, had a great day helping the Professor escape from the jungle when Toni Burkett and Monique Kleinschmidt from Whizz visited with prizes for their top-performing students.

(Our 2007 Summer Adventure in use at the Mead School, Tunbrdge Wells)

Our Summer (and Christmas) adventures encourage students to continue learning with Maths-Whizz; students must finish lessons before they can try the themed games, and they get to learn about jungle creatures with our colourful worksheets.

We’ll be bringing back the Prof and his rainforest antics each Summer, with brand new features. If you’re wondering how to keep your child occupied this summer, make sure he or she logs onto Maths-Whizz, because the Professor isn’t going to escape from the Mayan jungle all by himself…

[UPDATE: Read a study of 39 investigations into Summer Learning Loss]

[Read more about summer learning loss - Wikipedia]
 

But as it’s all in a good cause – raising money for the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) – I suggest you watch, enjoy, and check out the charity’s good work.

The video was made at Surrey’s Amesbury School, with the help of students, teachers, and parents.
Good show!

A test administered by researchers for Channel 4′s Dispatches programme found that:

Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.

As The Telegraph points out, ‘The material covered in the Dispatches test is contained in the primary national curriculum…’. And this chimes, rather sadly, with our long-held assertion that most adults have a maths age of 10 or 11. This is late Key Stage 2 – primary – maths, never mind GCSE.

In itself that might be worrying, but that we only ask a C-grade maths GCSE of new Primary school teachers implies that pedagogy and method is more important than knowledge and the confidence that comes from skill.

The God of Maths is a firm believer in the idea that you don’t have to know everything to teach excellently. Just as a good manager should always hope that he promotes his subordinates’ skills above his, a teacher should hope that his charges eventually over-take him. He just has to light the fire.

Despite this, something you cannot fake or rationalise away is a basic confidence and competence in a subject, and if significant numbers of primary teachers really are failing questions like these below, we ought to worry:

• 1.4 ÷ 0.1
• 2.1% of 400
• ABCDE is a pentagon. Name all its diagonals
• 7/16 + 3/4
• The mean height of a group of 4 people is 2 metres. One more person joins the group and then the mean height is 1.9 metres. What is the height of the new person?

‘A little fun can go a long way when it comes to learning‘.

We can’t argue with the sentiment, as it is one of the key principles that has informed Maths-Whizz development – if you do something you enjoy, you’ll do it well, even maths tutoring. It’s just up to the educator to help make the subject engaging. The Independent took a closer look at one of the country’s most ‘value added’ primary schools – Blue Bell Hill, in Nottingham – that seems to have taken this maxim to heart:

“We take them ice-skating or to a pantomime – or do dance and drama with them,” said headteacher Jo Bradley. It is not the usual recipe for ensuring good performance by 11-year-olds in national curriculum tests. But at a time when a growing number of schools are recording figures showing that more than half their pupils fail to reach the required standard in maths and English – 885 this year compared with 798 in 2008 – it is surprisingly effective.

Blue Bell Hill consistently outperformed expectations for a student body that is largely very poor, with many non-English-speakers. This is especially good, given that standards nationally seem to have slipped – with 79% of schools hitting expected targets, down from 80% last year.

Whilst the Independent’s headline attributes the high performance to simply having fun, it’s clear that the school’s consistent and dedicated leadership has played a large part in ensuring that standardised tests that receive so much scorn from teachers and parents alike needn’t necessarily be a roadblock, for even the most needy of students.

Hensingham Primary School, in particular, used the money to subscribe to Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools. Pupils now…

…carry out graded maths activities after assessment in school and continue them at home in a fun manner.

As Whitehaven News notes:

The equipment has proved to be very popular and in the short time they have been in school there has been an increased enthusiasm for reading and maths which speaks for itself.

We’re sure the South Whitehaven Partnership’s money has been well-spent!

Vaques and lapins do Maths-Whizz

Ormer House is one of the smallest schools on our books, but it’s testament (we hope!) to the quality of Maths-Whizz that they’ve opted to invest in our Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools service, and convinced the generous people behind Trover Coats (purveyors of all-weather coats to classy canines) to stump up the cash. They’ve even gone as far as to write about it in the local newspaper, and we’ve copied their article below.

A Big thanks to Ormer House for giving us some local recognition, and if Whizz had a doggy mascot, he’d be wearing a burgundy red Bone Dry.

Bone Dry!

Read on for the whole article.

Maths-Whizz is successful in Ormer House School

An initiative that has been introduced to the children of Ormer House has been given the thumbs up by the pupils, parents and their ICT teacher. “Maths-Whizz is a website that allows the children to develop their maths skills as well as their Information Communication Technology skills said Elaine Cathcart, ICT Teacher.

Each child who receives ICT classes has been enrolled on the website and the subscription has kindly been paid by a local company – Trover Coats.

The children were originally tested at the start of the new term to identify their own personal academic maths level. Lessons were then geared around that level and children learnt new maths concepts via build up exercises with the help of Miss Cathcart and they progressed at their own pace.

After each new concept has been explained on the computer to the child, they then undertake a small interactive exam and credits are given depending on the results of the exam. Children save up their credits and visit the interactive Maths-Whizz shop to purchase all sorts of goodies ranging from cuddly toys to virtual pets. They must also buy food for these pets and feed them regularly. “This develops their monetary skills and gives them responsibility for feeding their pets” explained Miss Cathcart. Each child has a virtual bedroom and can decorate this using their imagination as well as read any new letters they receive on their notice board. Reading skills are also developing during these lessons.

Parents also work at home with their children on the Maths-Whizz website. They can track their child’s progress and give support and help when required during lessons. The report card facility is checked every week by the teacher and shows how long each child has spent on lessons at home, how much progress has been achieved or if remediation work was necessary. Many of the children are now working at an age level higher than their actual age – this information is shown on the report card.

The children are very enthusiastic when working on Maths-Whizz because they know each time they move on to a new concept they can build up more credits which allows them to have fun in the Maths-Whizz shop.

From the FT:

Inquiries by maths experts about teacher training places have soared as the credit crunch tightens, official data obtained by the Financial Times show.

[Skeletor - formerly of Lehman Brothers, now teaching Year 6 maths in Didsbury]

Michael Watkins, TDA’s head of recruitment, told the Financial Times “bigger numbers are turning to teaching than ever before”.

Those men and women, formerly the toast of the city and dubbed ‘Masters of the Universe’, have lately been brought low by the financial crisis and recession. In times of difficulty, skilled workers often turn to the stable sectors including, of course, teaching.

This was predicted by many last year, and I have secretly been hoping that some of the brains behind credit asset-swaps and fiendishly clever derivatives will turn their skills towards an industry that rewards the soul (if not enlarge the wallet…).

Mr Watkins even calculated that the quality of applicants may have improved. He pointed out that many of those who were planning to move from a financial services career into teaching were bringing more than just strong academic achievement.

He surmised that in subjects such as maths and economics, individuals who had first-hand experience in the application of a theory carried a significant advantage when it came to teaching it.

But the FT piece ended with a caveat:

…cynics might suggest that the credit crunch shows a knowledge of advanced maths can be more dangerous than no knowledge of maths at all.

Does this mean we’ll have another generation of financial wizards leaving school in years to come? Who knows, but if nothing else the presence of thousands more highly-motivated intelligent men and women who know how maths is used in the ‘real’ world must surely be a good thing.

It can’t be too much to hope that these former masters of the universe will still need fun maths classroom tools and tutoring software to remind them that before you can package up sub-prime mortgages, you need to learn how to partition two-digit numbers…