Using Tassomai to help teach GCSE history
We recently spoke to John McDonnell, a history teacher at Chase High School in Southend-on-Sea who has found Tassomai really helps embed knowledge for students that he has limited time with.
How has Tassomai helped you with teaching history?
We have two elements to our subject, the knowledge element and the content element, which compared to other subjects is much greater. We don't just do straight memory recall, it's analysis and synthesis of the knowledge. So there's almost a two-step approach which makes history, probably from an academic point of view, much harder.
Another big advantage of Tassomai is that it’s an adaptive system, so the student just works through the questions and it targets their areas for improvement automatically. As a teacher, I can monitor progress easily from one screen. There are loads of online systems out there but it’s often just creating more work for the teacher so it's often just another thing that, with the best will in the world, won't get done.
Additionally, as a history teacher you don't get the number of hours some of the core subjects get, so if I do a recall quiz every fortnight then by the time students have written the answers and we’ve checked the misconceptions, that is at least 15 minutes of the lesson gone.
The adaptive side of Tassomai means that the students are always being tested on misconceptions and it's got that progressive element to learning that is very difficult for a teacher to focus on individually in a lesson. If I try to do something that's a bit more advanced it leaves half of the class behind, but equally, something very simplistic loses the half that already gets it.
“Tassomai plays an important role by being able to get the students to work on their memory and knowledge outside the lesson so that in class we can concentrate on the analytical and skill side of what they need for their exams.”
How does Tassomai help you as a teacher?
Tassomai is something that I can just pull up on the screen and see what the students are doing and where needs more time spent, as a class and an individual. The ability to be able to mix and match different topics at different times is also an important one. So, if we've got a mock exam coming up on a particular topic, I can focus in on that and equally if you want to interleave at other times, then you can do that too, there's a certain amount of flexibility.
Then the fact that it's on your phone means they are more likely to do it. There is an immediate reward of Daily Goals that we can incentivise even more, which helps with the reluctance of the non-engagers because it is something they can do quite easily.
How do you monitor the success of Tassomai?
There's a definite correlation between students who are doing multi-choice quizzes and attainment. I can see that students who are hitting their Daily Goals target, or even getting near to it, are remembering the knowledge. It’s all a part of the study pattern and if nothing else then Tassomai is getting them to do quizzes, which is better than doing nothing.
For students who are willing to work then Tassomai becomes an important mix in their study and for the reluctant learners, it could be the only thing they do but if they're doing it and they get into it then at least when they come into the exam you'd hope that they have some knowledge that they can get down.