Starting to Use Carousel
We are in the very early days of using Carousel Learning as a homework platform - initially in the Science faculty but soon across the whole school (although I first used it in the very early "trial" days with a Y8 class who are now in Y11!). I've been testing it out on all my classes - year 7 to year 12 - and it's been fascinating to see how students have reacted in various different ways to this new way, for them, of doing their homework.
I'm currently trying to plan the best way of our faculty exploiting the benefits of Carousel Learning, and I'm writing this blog post as a way of organising my thoughts and hopefully encouraging feedback & debate from other users.
Question Banks
One of the great features of Carousel is that you can create your own set of questions. This provides the ultimate in terms of flexibility, but it also could potentially mean loads of work creating question banks. However, there is also the "Community" where existing question banks have been shared by other Carousel users or by premium content providers. So you can download an editable copy of someone else's question bank and make it suitable for your school - then share it within your school if you have a "Platinum" account.
I spent quite a bit of time looking at the available question banks and matching them to our curriculum in Science from KS3 to KS5. It's amazing how much stuff people have already created and shared. A huge "thank you" to them.
Inevitably, when you look at "other people's questions" there are thing you would like to change, questions you would ask in a different way, or errors you need to correct. This means that the community question banks will certainly need modifying and cannot necessarily be used directly "off the shelf". If you keep changing the questions in a particular question bank then this has some knock-on effect, e.g. you cannot copy an existing quiz (because the file it references has changed). This has led me to believe that it would be better to create a larger group of smaller question banks (perhaps limited to a single topic) instead of a massive single question bank covering everything.
Linking to Long Term Plans
We have created "long term plans" that attempt to detail, for each topic in each year group, what students should already know, what this topic will teach them (in terms of declarative and procedural knowledge), what misconceptions we might encounter, what vocabulary students might need to learn and which questions students should be expected to be able to answer if they have "learned" the topic.
For example, this is an extract from our long term plan for Y7 Forces:
Previously, the "Questions" were a set of questions created by teachers that students might be expected to be able to answer after completing the learning sequence. Now, I propose that the questions are an individual Carousel question bank: in this case "Y7 3.1 Forces". Here is an extract from the question bank:
Typically, I would expect there to be around 50 questions for each topic in the long term plan - though many will be the same question asked in different ways.
Homework
For each topic in the long term plan, the weekly homework for each class will then be retrieval practice using Carousel with the questions from the relevant question bank. By having a relatively small set of questions (maybe 50 in total but probably less than 30 truly distinct questions) for each topic it means that "revise topic" instead of "revise questions" can be introduced earlier than if the topic contained hundreds of questions.
Should the homework be exclusively on questions covered in the week's lessons? Or should we include things coming up or things recently covered? Having a large question bank with multiple topics offers the greatest flexibility in this regard, but a smaller question bank on a single topic has other benefits (e.g. the file will be changed less often).
One option is to set multiple smaller homework tasks with questions set from different question banks in each task - some from this week, last week, previous weeks etc. This of course leads to other complexities and reasons for students not to complete their homework.
Assessment
We tend to use AQA's "Exampro" to create assessments for all year groups. This has the advantage of being able to choose past questions with appropriate levels of challenge, maths, practical skills etc. but means that much of the curriculum in untested in assessments. We have recently augmented this with a set of MCQs and tick-box/word-match questions before the Exampro section.
I think that once we have a Carousel question bank linked to each topic it makes sense that the assessment asks every (distinct) question from that bank. It has been said that the vast majority of GCSE questions are "recall" - whether recall of basic facts or recall of procedures - and so building the recall questions into every assessment would appear to make sense.
Thoughts
We know from multiple studies that retrieval practice is far more effective than the students' preferred methods of study (re-reading, note-taking, highlighting) and so any method that embeds retrieval into student habits is a positive step.
Building retrieval into homework from Y7 using a platform such as Carousel Learning will create good habits amongst students. Using the same questions in homework and assessments will build confidence in students' base level of understanding.
Thanks for reading.
Comments, suggestions and advice from other Carousel users very much appreciated.
