Using CENTURY to inform teaching
The data on CENTURY informs me of my students’ areas for improvement, which allows me to focus on those. By the end of an activity, I know where my learners are at, how much of the content I just taught they understood, what their misconceptions are and what kind of questions they can and can’t deal with and so on. If there’s a problem, I can tell whether it’s a skill issue, a concept issue or exactly which chapter it is. So, every time I start to teach in the morning, I am well informed on exactly what to target – there are no guessing games.
Saving teacher time
As a teacher, CENTURY saves you a lot of admin and content creation time. The marking is taken care of, and the students get feedback immediately. It’s like you’re giving feedback for each and every single student in one go, which you obviously couldn’t do as a human. Imagine marking every single book in less than one minute – CENTURY does that for you, and it gives you all of the data.
Helping pupils progress
For two terms, I have had a child who just wasn’t making progress and I didn’t know why. I got them to do extra homework and stay on after lessons, but it wasn’t making a difference – they really wanted to improve, and they were getting tired of putting effort in and not being able to move up.
When CENTURY came, those learners who had been really struggling to make progress started to improve consistently for the first time. In fact, their engagement with the platform was even higher than that of the other students.
It’s the first time I’ve seen children this motivated because they can see the correlation between what they’re doing on CENTURY and how it’s improving their results – not just in terms of their results on CENTURY, but when it comes to exams and formal assessments. One student actually improved their grade by 10%, and another by over 18% since using CENTURY, and they couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even believe it myself. I was marking their paper, and I thought “Is this real? Have I miscounted the marks?”.
I also took a class that was performing the worst in their year and got them onto the platform, while keeping the other classes the same so that I could compare. I thought that if CENTURY works for that class, it really works. I could see that the children weren’t lazy because of the amount of hours they put in – they just didn’t know what to target. Once they started using CENTURY, they actually overtook two other classes in terms of their average score. This was the first time they had an average above any other class, you should have seen their jubilation!
It showed me that this tool really works because I had previously tried almost everything to help students who were struggling – some parents had even hired tutors for their children – but nothing had worked. With CENTURY, we knew exactly what to target and how to help. So, I can’t see myself without it at the moment, I’ve been so spoilt by it.
Hayley Morris, Educator, Curro Serengeti High School
Targeting interventions
For me personally, CENTURY has immense power in helping the teacher at school deal with the statistics of their subject. We often get caught up with the daily humdrum of teaching, marking and preparing lessons, and we only really see the impact of all of that when we have exam results. CENTURY allows us to see who needs extra support before the exams take place and helps target interventions.
It has been an amazing tool for identifying the students who slips through the gaps in our normal teaching, and to target them and help them improve. As a teacher, I find a lot of my time is spent pushing learners who could get an A to get an A, and providing extra support for those
learners who aren’t doing well. The in-between-learners, who are doing well but not quite reaching their full potential, sometimes fall through the gaps.
What CENTURY allows me to do is to identify the group of kids who could be performing even better, and to target their areas for improvement and help them make progress. It has really helped those children.
There is a definite connection between the learners who actively engage with CENTURY and their exam marks and those who aren’t engaging with it as well as they should be and their results. The correlation is clear.
Using CENTURY to target the basics
What I’ve realised over my years of teaching is that the learners often forget the basics from one year to the next, and as teachers, we don’t have the time to go over them all every year. As a result, the students end up losing marks because of, for example, misconceptions or a lack of basic comprehension skills. CENTURY can target really specific core skills that are causing a student’s problems.
The students who have been using the platform are able to tackle the questions well in exams because they’re not just guessing or following a method without really understanding it, they really know how to answer the questions.
Ease of use
CENTURY is extremely easy to use as a teacher. If you are a teacher who wants to use the data and insights on CENTURY to determine your teaching, you can do so and use it to plan. However, even if you’re more cautious of technology and just want to let it do its thing, the AI has you covered. It will help the learners no matter your level of engagement.
From the learners’ perspective, it is very easy to use. It’s very easy to access. The nuggets that pop up are exactly what the learners need, and the parents can monitor how much time their child is spending on it and what they’re doing on it if they want to.
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