28 January 2025
Smart Revise will always try to prioritise questions from newly unlocked topics so that students see new material first. As a teacher you will then have data about misconceptions and knowledge gaps quickly after a topic has been taught, however it does require you to remember to unlock those new topics for students too!
In the class settings there are three levels of control in addition to setting which particular topics are available to students.
Teacher controlled topic filtering
Teacher controlled is for your day-to-day use of Smart Revise. It will ensure that students focus on newly available questions first and after that the algorithms will choose an appropriate diet of questions from across the topics to ensure knowledge gaps are a priority, in addition to appropriate spaced learning and working towards mastery. Students cannot control which questions they are asked with this setting.
Teacher guided topic filtering
Teacher guided gives students the freedom to choose their own topic filters but only from those you have enabled. Students can do this either from their topic filters button on their dashboard, or by selecting a pie chart on their progress summary report. This option is great when students are preparing for an end of topic test but have not covered the full course yet. You don’t want them to see questions from topics that you haven’t taught.
Student controlled topic filtering
Student controlled gives students full control over all the topics in the course. It enables them to focus on a single topic or a range of topics at the same time. This is great at the end of the course once teaching is complete, and students are in that final revision stage, often on study leave.
You might be tempted to use teacher guided most of the time as it strikes a balance between teacher and student control. However, it will encourage students to engage in what is known as “blocking” where they are likely to focus on a very narrow range of questions, aiming to master a topic before moving on to the next. At face value this seems reasonable, however, there is a real risk that once questions have been mastered and their summary report shows a full green pie chart that students will not see the need to return to that topic again. This will inadvertently introduce the forgetting curve and will not help them prepare for exams.
We need to consider that students are not aware of the academic research that indicates blocking and not returning to completed topics could be detrimental to their success. Instead, they should be encouraged to engage in interleaving and spaced learning. That is mixing questions from different topics causing the brain to context switch and aid memory retention over the longer term. Spacing means returning to a question after a period of time has elapsed and not immediately. Students naturally want to correct their mistakes and work through a tick list of topics until they are all complete, but this is not ideal for learning.
More options
You can also control which modes your students have access to: Quiz, Terms reflective, Terms interactive and Advance. It is fine to enable all these from the start of the course. If you are new to Smart Revise and are following our suggested implementation plan, “The Journey”, you may want students to focus on using Quiz for homework initially. In which case enable Quiz but disable Terms and Advance. When you start to use Smart Revise for baseline assessments or monthly reviews enable Terms. Advance includes longer answer questions and some of these are quite challenging, so enable these when you feel students are ready. Perhaps in preparation for their first end of topic test. It’s really up to you how much or how little of the platform you want the students in your class to have access to.
All these topic filters!
It is worth noting that in addition to the topic filters in the class settings that control questions students will be exposed to, the analytics reports that you can use to track progress use their own filters that are independent too. This means that you can analyse the class performance in one particular topic, discovering the top ten least well answered questions in the most recently taught topic while the class are revising a range of topics.
If you join the class as a student in student mode, for example to demonstrate Smart Revise to your class, remember that you will now have a further set of topic filters as a student, depending on the control you have given to the class.
Our suggestion
To keep things straightforward, our suggestion is to:
- Enable all the modes: Quiz, Terms and Advance.
- Set the class topic filters to Teacher controlled.
- When student prepare for tests set them to teacher guided and remember after the test to set them back to teacher controlled.
- At the end of the course set the topic filters to student controlled.
- Tick the topics you have taught to date (not the one you are currently teaching) and put reminders in your calendar to unlock new topics as they are taught throughout the course.
Engaging students
Students would much prefer to have complete control over their topic filters! Tell them why that is not such a good idea. They need to trust Smart Revise to choose questions and topics that the data say they need to work on in a spaced and interleaved way. This is the best method for long-term memory retention.
Curious to learn more about Smart Revise or try it for free? You can get all the details HERE.
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