Students Achieve Even More Math Growth Thanks to Program Improvements

     In short: we improved 342 of our tasks, based on anonymous student progress data and feedback that we receive from our teachers and students on a regular basis.

     Our students successfully solve more tasks and spend more time on the platform than they used to. On average, the number of successfully completed tasks increased by 24% compared to the previous year. This number shows significant math growth, which we can also see on the results of the End-of-Year Assessment. 

     How have we achieved this feat? We improved 342 of our tasks based on teacher and student feedback and anonymous metrics on how students work through the lessons. Our research was fun and challenging, and in this article we’d like to share some findings that we made during our analytical adventure. 

     The main focus of the Happy Numbers Content Team is to make learning meaningful and fun, and to always keep students in their Zone of Proximal Development. To do so, we always monitor the level of difficulty of tasks: they should be challenging but achievable. First of all, it’s important that every student starts from the appropriate place in our curriculum. You can learn more about how we developed our Placement Test here. 

     But what happens after the test when our students meet too difficult, unclear, or boring exercises? They just close the tab! That’s why a team of 25 people, consisting of methodologists, user experience designers, illustrators, Spanish translators, programmers, and quality assurance engineers, is constantly working to improve the content!

     As you know, Happy Numbers constantly collects anonymized data on student performance and uses it to control the following metrics:

     Since the task has to present some level of challenge, student errors are expected, but, with individual feedback on different kinds of mistakes, the student is able to achieve the goal with a minimum number of errors. If, however, students make more than 4 mistakes on a task, it means we haven’t provided the required level of support, and the exercise should be improved. Therefore, we always expect an exponential decrease in the number of student mistakes.

      We expect that, on average, students should be able to solve one complete task within 3 minutes for PK-K students, within 5 minutes for grades 1-2, and within 7 minutes for grades 3-5. Our research shows that otherwise students get frustrated.

     We monitor the percentage of students who stopped during or after a task and did not continue working on Happy Numbers within a month. This is another way to see if the exercises are too boring or difficult to understand. We re-work these tasks to maintain student interest.

     First of all, after we identify the task, we go through the topic and take a fresh look at it. Sometimes, the problem can be identified right away. In other cases, though, the reason is not so obvious, and we have to go deeper inside student answers to analyze them. 

    There are a few important markers that we observe:

     We even got some feedback that the kids thought they were solving the same problem multiple times. To engage our students, especially the youngest ones, we’ve added game-like elements: 

2. We also made a number of small changes, fixing these common mistakes:

     We see now that students solve more exercises and spend more time on the platform this year. Compared to the last school year, the average number of exercises completed by a student has increased by 24%! Like our little colleagues, your students, we’re always learning and improving ourselves. Our entire Content Team wants to thank you and your students for not letting us relax, allowing us to continually improve and grow!