GCSE Science exam revision in the classroom

The education sector is seeing a step change in digital transformation and sAInaptic is here to revolutionise the way teachers set and mark homework and tasks.

It's time to move beyond traditional digital aids based on multiple choice questions that only test recall.

It's time to gift our teachers with an automated tool that truly complements their skills by reducing their workload.

It's time to empower schools with regular, consistent and detailed insights on student performances based on a true understanding of knowledge consolidation that can be used for meaningful targeted interventions.

Teachers spend up to two day's worth of their time, per week, marking homework and tasks. Although marking students' work gives teachers a better idea of pupil abilities and a chance to feedback, there are a number of issues that come to mind:

• practice of in-class 'exam style' questions adds to the print/photocopy budget
• setting and monitoring personalised high-quality homework is time-consuming
• marking is tedious and repetitive  🙇🏻
• it can be laborious to identify and consistently track individual student's strengths and gaps in knowledge, such as particular concepts that students get wrong repeatedly
• resulting in inadequate interventions

With sAInaptic, thousands of student responses can be marked instantly - well, in a few seconds - 45 responses/second to be precise. More importantly though, the marking is standardised and detailed analytics can empower a teacher and a school to focus on providing more personalised, timely and continuous interventions. Let me highlight the point about standardised marking - sAInaptic marks a student response in exactly the same way the second time, the hundredth time or the millionth time it sees that answer; sAInaptic never gets tired and is completely unbiased! You will also be pleased to know that preliminary studies show that sAInaptic's marking is well within the inter-rater-variability seen among high-stakes examiners.

Here's what one of our teacher user says about their experience of using sAInaptic with their class:

"Very easy to use. I liked that command words were highlighted, and that the number of marks available was shown. The AI marking was almost spot on. The idea of highlighting where the answer met key concepts and criteria will be very useful to students, where concepts were missed, highlighting these is a good way for students to improve their understanding and content knowledge."

We really have used a user-first, teacher-led approach to product development and this is evident in almost all features of the app as highlighted in the testimonial above.

See what you can do with sAInaptic:

sAInaptic's questions have been designed by our pedagogical team consisting of highly experienced secondary science teachers and past examiners. Therefore, its auto-marking algorithm is trained on the rubrics that this team has painstakingly developed for each of the high-quality exam style questions. These are very closely aligned to the specification points developed by the various national curricula in the UK and abroad. This means that the questions and the auto-marking should be fairly easy to relate to across the four boards that we have launched.

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You can set personalised tasks according to your teaching groups. Choose from a growing bank of questions (currently 2000+) and filter for Combined/Separate and Foundation/Higher.

Finally, the teacher dashboard. This is also being designed taking teacher feedback into account. Here are some of the key features that we have developed for our first release:

• teachers will be able to view student work across the whole class
• and all the way to an individual student's performance on a per question level
• sAInaptic's feedback - a score, concepts that the mark was awarded for and concepts that were missed - are all visible in table format

Moreover, in the future, a teacher will have the ability to override sAInaptic's marking if they feel that its marking does not look right.

These features will help teachers quickly identify if there are gaps in the consolidation of particular concepts within groups of students and provide timely help to those who need it the most. Moreover, teachers always have the last say - sAInaptic's marking can be over written if the teacher thinks that the machine has got it wrong.

One of our core values as an EdTech company is to make artificial intelligence transparent and accessible to teachers and students alike. Showing clearly which part of the student answer received marks and bringing to their attention all rubrics or concepts that the machine has been trained on, are ways by which we achieve this. And most importantly, we want to empower our teachers with data insights 📊 akin to examiner reports that are published only once a year.

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We are actively recruiting schools to join the school app trial, so if you are a teacher and would like to know more, please reach out to us at kavitha@sainaptic.com. You can also help us make greater impact by sharing this article within your networks. More information is available at https://sainaptic.com/teachers.