The Tassomai impact on Humanities

The Tassomai team spoke to Clare Quarton, Teaching Team Leader for Humanities, Treviglas Academy, Newquay about how she and her department have implemented Tassomai and the impact it has had so far…

We started using Tassomai when I wanted to refresh our approach to homework. We were setting quizzes but writing them ourselves, which took a lot of time. When we saw that the school was trialling Tassomai for science, I thought it would be a great fit for history and geography too because of the time it saves but also how it works out a student’s strengths and weaknesses.

An extra pair of hands

Tassomai has worked really well for history and geography because both subjects are really content heavy and there’s a lot to remember. Within the classrooms, we've always been really good at the skills side of learning but we simply don’t have the time to go back and review all of the content and test on it. So having Tassomai, as a Head of Faculty but also as a classroom teacher, feels like I’ve got backup and I know that the retrieval practice side is covered. Sometimes the students are learning before we've even covered a topic in class, and I think that's really helpful because then they've got that previous interest as a result straight away. 

The impact

Traditionally, we’ve found that our students have done better on the skills side of the exams, and there are a few different reasons for that. We've got a couple of trained examiners across the departments, but it's also because we've got students who don't naturally revise, and I'm sure that's true of a lot of schools. 

Therefore, when the exams are more content rather than skills focused, we haven't done so well. That's where Tassomai has come in and covered that gap and we saw the results of Tassomai last year. We implemented Tassomai at more or less the beginning of the year and we saw the results improve in the summer. The difference in difficulty between the exam papers wasn’t much and we didn't do much else radically different, so that is a clear Tassomai impact. I'm hoping that this year, because this is the first year 11 group who have completed the whole of the course, we will see that difference again for the students. 

Winning tastes sweet

We've got a weekly league table, which is done by class, and we look at their percentage average for the whole class and the winners get sweets. It isn’t revolutionary but it has made a difference. We've got one year 11 geography class that gets 100% every time now, and because they always get 100% they all start to feel that they can't let the side down. So that kind of collective side of it is nice as well. 

As we get to exam time, I like to review each student’s tree with them, as this is a really nice visual way of discussing their strongest and weakest topics with them.

My way to describe Tassomai would be… data driven

Tassomai gives us such good, useful data that we can easily translate and put into practice in the classroom at that moment.

Find out more about using Tassomai for history and Tassomai for geography.