How does EP support different pedagogical approaches?

Education Perfect is intentionally designed to leverage a range of proven pedagogical approaches that improve student outcomes. 

This multifaceted approach includes presenting engaging and adaptive resources to students alongside actionable data insights, creating a solid basis for formative assessment.

1. Explicit instruction 

EP lessons begin with a clear introduction and learning intentions to outline to students what they will be learning and what they are expected to know by the end. 

Teachers can use the Fullscreen option within lessons to project them onto a whiteboard to explain and model a new concept or approach as a whole class. 

Information is presented in small chunks, with supporting images, audio, or videos to ensure multiple representations. Worked examples are used extensively and are followed by carefully scaffolded questions for students to complete. These are automatically graded and presented with model answers and explanations. 

Once a set of information and questions has been mastered, new material is introduced and the process is repeated, with careful interleaving of information, examples, questioning, and feedback throughout the lesson. 

By the end of a lesson, a student has progressed from carefully guided questioning to independent practice and the opportunity to apply their new knowledge and skills to extended thinking tasks. 

Finally, lessons conclude with a review of what has been learned and a recap of the original learning intentions.

2. Differentiation   

EP provides a range of ways to easily cater to individual student needs. 

• Teachers can assign lessons to groups or individuals within a class and can easily assign specific sections of lessons to target specific skills, abilities or difficulty levels. 

• Teachers can customise resources or create their own using EP’s integrated content editing features, providing further tailoring to meet the unique needs of their students. This includes the ability to replace written response components with the audio recorder or file uploader components for students who may struggle to compose a standard written answer.
• Teachers and students have vertical access to content across upper primary to senior secondary ensuring access to resources that are relevant and targeted. Having access to curriculum resources across year levels means all students can use the same platform; those achieving at lower levels are spared from feeling self-conscious and are able to learn at a more rapid rate.
• In addition to tailoring and targeting learning material, teachers can use EP’s assessment functionality to identify student strengths and weaknesses, and automatically generate recommended next steps to create a unique learning pathway for each student. This is explored further in the formative assessment section later in this document.

3. Adaptive practice

EP lessons include varied question types; from simple recall and comprehension of newly presented material through to scaffolded practice and extensive independent practice. These are adaptive to student responses, with automatic grading where possible, clear model answers and repetition with dynamic question variants until a student has demonstrated mastery. 

Further revision is enabled through EP’s Quiz tool, delivering targeted practice questions that are responsive to student answers without the surrounding instructional material. This functionality can be used to allow sufficient practice for students to build confidence and fluency in the target topic.

4. Gamification

EP includes a variety of gamification elements that are designed to enhance student engagement and persistence. Every question answered correctly earns students a point, contributing to their annual score and placing them on a scoreboard alongside their classmates and school. These points are directly tied to effort rather than performance, giving students of all ability levels a chance to engage actively. The points system is further utilised in annual competitions for each subject, where students compete with other students worldwide to earn certificates, badges and other prizes.

• Dash is unlocked once a lesson is completed and provides a fast-paced, competitive review of automatically marked questions from the lesson. This harnesses a number of gamified elements including peer competition, time-trials, high scores and leaderboards. A balance of speed and accuracy are rewarded, creating an engaging and  highly effective tool for consolidating learning.
  
• Students can also earn a range of digital stickers (Cheers) of varying rarity by completing EP lessons. These stickers can be collected in their digital sticker collection and sent to other students as encouragement. Teachers can award additional stickers to students to reward or motivate reasonable effort.
  
  
• EP offers teachers the option to create their own competitions using the in-platform Competitions feature. Teachers can create anything from a short, sharp contest - great for exit tickets or lesson revision - through to a more sustained event such as a Science Week competition.

5. Timely and specific feedback

Feedback is one of the most powerful tools available to educators. However, to be effective, it must be both specific, and timely. The EP platform provides ongoing and actionable feedback to students in various ways.

• As students progress through a lesson, many questions are automatically marked with model answers provided, allowing for continuous feedback as they move through the learning. This ensures students progress to mastery at a pace and level of guidance that suits each individual.
• Lessons also contain extended response questions that require more involved student responses; these are not automatically marked. Instead, example answers and grading criteria are provided, and students self-review their responses and can opt to improve on them. 
• Teachers can view and provide feedback on students' responses via written or recorded verbal feedback.

• Feedback options are available for use in our Peer Review feature, an anonymous, teacher-mediated student-to-student feedback tool. 

6. Mastery-based progression

EP lessons are carefully scaffolded, chunked and paced to allow all students the opportunity to experience success. Instructional material is interwoven with questioning, and students are provided with instant and targeted feedback. If a student answers incorrectly, then the question and feedback cycle continues until mastery is established.

Supporting this focus on mastery, completing an EP lesson requires a student to eventually answer every question correctly. Alongside the student completion measures, our learning analytics monitors time spent, accuracy of answers and records student responses, including specific errors or areas of difficulty. This enables the teacher to provide targeted support to students that need it, further enabling mastery of the learning material by every student.

7. Formative assessment

Formative assessment is a powerful tool and can take many forms, including learning conversations, exit slips, peer review activities, student self-reflection, checks for understanding, and quick quizzes.

EP can be used to execute an explicit formative assessment cycle that helps to drive student learning growth. This can involve:

1. Pre-testing using the Assessments tool to determine each student’s prior knowledge.
2. Automated, personalised recommended next steps for each learner, based on their pre-test results.
3. Post-testing to gain an updated measure of student knowledge once learning tasks are completed. 
4. Analysis and actionable insights into student learning growth based on progression between pre and post-tests using the Compare Results option.

These assessments can be custom made, selected from EP’s existing range of assessments, or teachers can quickly compile a Quiz using existing lesson content. The Quiz feature allows teachers to select any combination of EP lessons, with a formative assessment generated based on the automatically marked content from selected lessons. 

Reporting allows teachers to see where students are making progress, where gaps in knowledge are being filled, and determine future pathways based on clear and actionable data. This is a huge asset when having learning conversations, and offering personal feedback to individual students.

8. Spaced repetition

EP has a range of features that encourage the spaced review of learning material. Points are awarded for each correct answer to lessons, with an additional point per question available at the following intervals:

• One day.
• One week.
• One month.
• Three months.
• Six months.

9. Flipped Learning

EP can help to maximise the impact of face-to-face/synchronous lesson time. 

Teachers can easily assign specific lower-order sections from the EP lesson for students to complete for homework. For example, assigning students the key Information slides and automatically marked questions gives students the foundation they need to complete the more complex, higher-order thinking tasks in lesson time under teacher supervision, or can free up valuable time to explore a topic in more depth through discussion and practical experiences. 

10. Project-based Learning

Project based learning is a teaching method where students develop their understanding of content by actively engaging in real-world projects. EP supports the implementation of PBL in the classroom. View our dedicated Project-Based Learning help guide.

For any feedback or questions, please reach out to our team.