Why are students in the same class getting different homework topics?

Past activity is taken into account

Each week, when a homework topic is added to the Planner, the student’s ability and past activity is taken into account to create bespoke homework made up of questions at the right level.

Pre-requisite topics may be included

On some occasions, if a student is very weak in the topic that is set, they will see prerequisite questions that cover the skills they need before they can move on to the current topic. For example, if rounding to the nearest whole number is set as a homework topic, weaker students may get rounding to the nearest 100 and stronger students may get questions on rounding to 1 or 2 decimal places.

Personalised to speed as well as attainment

As Sparx is personalised and students work at different speeds on different topics, whilst we aim for the length set by the teacher (default is 60 minutes), each student will have a different number of questions in their homework. This will mean they see different numbers of questions on specific topics and their Consolidation questions will be even more varied topic-wise student to student in each homework.

A good quality homework

As a result, occasionally the algorithm may not be able to fit every topic in you plan in, in order to give the students the best quality homework. This is done on a student by student level. We generally recommend 2-3 topics per week but occasionally the third is not able to be included. Any topics which don't go into the students in-focus questions will come up again in their consolidation.

Action you can take

When Creating your Schemes of Learning choose the optimal number of topics per week to make sure students get the topics they need to see:

• 60 Minute homework: 3 topics
• 30 Minute homework: 1-2 topics