The part about getting kids to distribute their practice is really interesting. My best students seem to 'binge practice'. I analyzed my 10 best students one year – these were the ones who had improved by 1.5 - 2 standard deviations on SAT or ACT math sections and had answered at least 1000 timed questions on our platform. (The software gives them 60 seconds per question, but the average response time is 28 seconds.) In this group, the median student answered a question on only 17% of the days. In other words, if they were on the platform for 100 days, they only answered a questions on 17 of them. The most consistent student answered questions on 37% of the days, which is still not that consistent.
Anyway, obviously this is a very small sample, but it does correlate with other studies we've done and feedback from tutors. And who knows, maybe they would have answered a lot more questions and improved more if they'd practiced every day! But I think most teenagers are not able to commit to this.
The part about getting kids to distribute their practice is really interesting. My best students seem to 'binge practice'. I analyzed my 10 best students one year – these were the ones who had improved by 1.5 - 2 standard deviations on SAT or ACT math sections and had answered at least 1000 timed questions on our platform. (The software gives them 60 seconds per question, but the average response time is 28 seconds.) In this group, the median student answered a question on only 17% of the days. In other words, if they were on the platform for 100 days, they only answered a questions on 17 of them. The most consistent student answered questions on 37% of the days, which is still not that consistent.
Anyway, obviously this is a very small sample, but it does correlate with other studies we've done and feedback from tutors. And who knows, maybe they would have answered a lot more questions and improved more if they'd practiced every day! But I think most teenagers are not able to commit to this.
Thanks for sharing!