More responsive Daily Goals!

This article was updated on 21/9/20 to reflect updates to this feature.

What’s Changed

We have adapted the Daily Goal to make it more motivating and rewarding for the student to complete: now, each time a student finishes their Daily Goal, they will be awarded a reduction to their target for the next day.

We have listened to feedback that Daily Goals can be too high, and that this can put students off from regularly logging in; we also know that there are huge benefits to be gained if students can spread their work on Tassomai. This new development is designed to encourage students to build Tassomai into a manageable and sustainable daily routine.

Complete your daily goal today, and tomorrow it will be lower; fail to complete it tomorrow and it will go up a bit the next day.

This feature will be enabled for all students. As their teacher, you have the option to disable it for a class via the settings page.

That’s all the information you need to know, but if you’re interested we’ve gone into more detail on the reasoning behind this change below. There are also some FAQs which we’d recommend you read if you have any other questions.

The Thought Process

Tassomai is based on several pedagogical principles: interleaving, spacing and a “little and often” approach. These are all proven to be extremely effective ways to learn, and are what the daily goal aims to encourage.

Currently, however, our data has shown that some students “binge” Tassomai - answering lots of questions in one go, and then don’t use it for several days. By making the daily goal more responsive, we are trying to encourage “smooth” engagement, where users login more often but for shorter periods. A more regular pattern of engagement is not only healthier and more sustainable, but also a more effective way to learn.

The majority of our KS4 users have had a daily goal of 40 which did not change, regardless of their level of engagement. We have had feedback from teachers, parents and students that not only is this target too high, but the fact that it does not change is demotivating. The new, more responsive, daily goal addresses both of these issues.

How It Works

Our new daily goal uses a formula to apply a “discount” for each goal hit in recent days to give a logical and simple reward to each user: complete your daily goal today, and tomorrow it will be lower; fail to complete it tomorrow and it will go back up a bit for the next day.

This discount is applied on a per subject basis. If a student who is using Tassomai for maths and science, has completed 7 maths daily goals and no science daily goals in the last week, they will have a higher goal in science than in maths.

The formula is designed to ensure that students do a more achievable amount more regularly, meaning that they complete more questions per week, in a “healthier” way than they were doing previously.

If you are interested to know more, or have any questions about the new daily goal or how it will impact your students, please get in touch - we’d love to hear your thoughts and talk it through with you.

FAQS

Will this mean my students do less work?

Although the value of the daily goal will, on average, be lower for most students, the total workload should not be reduced since students will need to complete their daily goals more regularly to access the lower daily goal.

Students who are already completing a very high number of daily goals (5+) will be asked to do less overall - if you’re not happy with their total workload, we recommend that you ask them to complete their bonus goals, or set them a total target in number of questions correct or progress gained per week and monitor it from your dashboard.

How do I disable or enable this setting?

For teachers:

If you do want to disable or enable the Daily Goal discount, you have to do this for individual classes. Simply navigate to the relevant class from your dashboard, and click on the “settings” tab, where you will find the section “Daily Goal Discounts”.

N.B. This is only possible on a class-by-class basis.

N.B. If a student is in multiple forms, and one of these forms has the discount disabled, then it will be disabled for that learner, even if all of their other forms have it enabled. This is the case even if a learner is studying multiple subjects; discounts will either be enabled for all of their subjects or for none of them.

For parents:

Please email us and we will disable this setting for your child.

Students are complaining that the daily goal isn’t reducing. Is the discount not working?

There are three potential reasons that the daily goal may not be reducing for students.

If a student is in multiple forms, and any of the forms has the discount disabled, this will override the discount for their other forms.

Students who are predicted to complete the whole course ahead of schedule will see a daily goal of 15 questions per day, if they complete the daily goal 7 days per week - it cannot be lower than this. If the students complaining are on 100% projected final progress, which you can see from your dashboard, this is likely what’s happening.

The reduction of the value of the daily goal wears off after several days. This means that a student who is only completing one or 2 daily goals per week (with a gap of 3 or 4 days between them) will be told their daily goal will be lower tomorrow, but then when they log on after a few days the reduction has worn off. For these students, it’s important to make it clear that they only get a reduction in the daily goal if they are completing it on consecutive days, or at least every other day.

If it is not any of the above, then please get in touch so that we can investigate.

Why is this being released now?

We delayed releasing this by a few weeks to avoid disrupting Year 11 students during their exams. Now that exams are over, we wanted to give younger students a boost, and help them to stay engaged over the holidays.

This feature will also be live next year, and will hopefully boost engagement for all students.