What does the data on a student flight path mean?

Flight path

Students have three flight paths that show their progress with the content in Smart Revise. The blue line shows progress with Quiz (multiple choice), pink is Terms (definitions) and green is Advance (written answers).

Flight path

Selecting “expand” will show the student a more detailed daily breakdown too. Each dot representing a day they logged in and used Smart Revise.

Expanded flight path

Teachers can see the flight path for each student in their analytic reports, and the more detailed view by selecting “Load full data”. A top tip is to hover over a dot to see the date and the progress on that date.

Students should aim to be in the green “target cone” at all times, and the teacher can set the parameters for that in the class and individual student settings.

Quiz progress

Every time a student answers a Quiz question correctly the count for that question increases by one. The algorithms will reprioritise the question in the queue, but each question can be answered correctly up to three times to count towards flight path data. So, think of each question being worth 0-3 points. If a question is answered incorrectly, it is given a much higher priority, so will be more likely to be shown again in the near future but will also have its count reset to zero. This is the reason that flight paths can go down too.

If a course has 600 questions and the student has answered every question correctly three times, that would be 1800 points or 100%. Imagine a student that has mastered 75 questions (that means correct three times in a row), 20 questions answered correctly twice, 10 questions answered correctly once, and 8 questions answered incorrectly. Their progress on Quiz can be calculated as:

(75 * 3) + (20 * 2) + (10 * 1) = 275. If there are 600 questions in the set, the maximum is 1800, so 275 is 15%.

Remember that Quiz questions asked in a task also contribute to flight path progress when the marks are released to the students.

Terms progress

Each term can be self-assessed by the student as red, amber or green. Only green terms count for the flight path so if there are 200 terms and the student has 30 marked green then their progress on Terms would be 15%.

When terms definitions are asked in a task, the student must score full marks for the term to be recorded as green and have a positive effect on the flight path. Anything less and the answer won’t count.

Advance progress

Advance is much more complex. Questions are tagged as easy, medium or hard and students must have answered a range of questions across the three difficulties to achieve 100%. They do not need to answer every question to achieve 100%, but they cannot answer all the easy questions for example without their progress being capped.

We aim for students to be “exam ready”. In classic revision that would mean having attempted and received high marks across a range of past papers. Smart Revise captures this by ensuring students must have achieved a given number of marks in easy, medium and hard questions to achieve 100% progress. For example, that could be 100 marks of easy questions, 100 marks of medium questions and 100 marks of hard questions. Every mark is worth a point. The harder questions are worth more marks, and therefore there are more flight path points to be gained.

Progress and grades

There is a clear positive correlation between the number of marks a student achieves in Smart Revise and the number of marks they are likely to achieve in a real exam. It stands to reason, the more revision and practice of questions they do the better a student will perform in an exam. However, progress in Smart Revise and grade boundaries are not related. It is not possible to say that 60% progress is the same as 60% in an exam. Therefore, we advise caution when interpreting the data in that way. See flight paths more as an indicator of how much students are using Smart Revise and how well they are answering questions. I.e. the amount of content they have seen and their confidence.

Of course, it is possible to set flight path targets to match target grades based on exam grade boundaries, and this is a good starting point, but always raise expectations with the flight path. Set the minimum and aspiration targets in Smart Revise to be higher than target grades.

What’s the difference between the topic filters?

Topic filters

Smart Revise will always try to prioritise questions from newly unlocked topics so that students see new material first. As a teacher you will then have data about misconceptions and knowledge gaps quickly after a topic has been taught, however it does require you to remember to unlock those new topics for students too!

In the class settings there are three levels of control in addition to setting which particular topics are available to students.

Topic filter options.

Teacher controlled topic filtering

Teacher controlled is for your day-to-day use of Smart Revise. It will ensure that students focus on newly available questions first and after that the algorithms will choose an appropriate diet of questions from across the topics to ensure knowledge gaps are a priority, in addition to appropriate spaced learning and working towards mastery. Students cannot control which questions they are asked with this setting.

Teacher guided topic filtering

Teacher guided gives students the freedom to choose their own topic filters but only from those you have enabled. Students can do this either from their topic filters button on their dashboard, or by selecting a pie chart on their progress summary report. This option is great when students are preparing for an end of topic test but have not covered the full course yet. You don’t want them to see questions from topics that you haven’t taught.

Student controlled topic filtering

Student controlled gives students full control over all the topics in the course. It enables them to focus on a single topic or a range of topics at the same time. This is great at the end of the course once teaching is complete, and students are in that final revision stage, often on study leave.

You might be tempted to use teacher guided most of the time as it strikes a balance between teacher and student control. However, it will encourage students to engage in what is known as “blocking” where they are likely to focus on a very narrow range of questions, aiming to master a topic before moving on to the next. At face value this seems reasonable, however, there is a real risk that once questions have been mastered and their summary report shows a full green pie chart that students will not see the need to return to that topic again. This will inadvertently introduce the forgetting curve and will not help them prepare for exams.

We need to consider that students are not aware of the academic research that indicates blocking and not returning to completed topics could be detrimental to their success. Instead, they should be encouraged to engage in interleaving and spaced learning. That is mixing questions from different topics causing the brain to context switch and aid memory retention over the longer term. Spacing means returning to a question after a period of time has elapsed and not immediately. Students naturally want to correct their mistakes and work through a tick list of topics until they are all complete, but this is not ideal for learning.

More options

You can also control which modes your students have access to: Quiz, Terms reflective, Terms interactive and Advance. It is fine to enable all these from the start of the course. If you are new to Smart Revise and are following our suggested implementation plan, “The Journey”, you may want students to focus on using Quiz for homework initially. In which case enable Quiz but disable Terms and Advance. When you start to use Smart Revise for baseline assessments or monthly reviews enable Terms. Advance includes longer answer questions and some of these are quite challenging, so enable these when you feel students are ready. Perhaps in preparation for their first end of topic test. It’s really up to you how much or how little of the platform you want the students in your class to have access to.

All these topic filters!

It is worth noting that in addition to the topic filters in the class settings that control questions students will be exposed to, the analytics reports that you can use to track progress use their own filters that are independent too. This means that you can analyse the class performance in one particular topic, discovering the top ten least well answered questions in the most recently taught topic while the class are revising a range of topics.

If you join the class as a student in student mode, for example to demonstrate Smart Revise to your class, remember that you will now have a further set of topic filters as a student, depending on the control you have given to the class.

Our suggestion

To keep things straightforward, our suggestion is to:

  • Enable all the modes: Quiz, Terms and Advance.
  • Set the class topic filters to Teacher controlled.
  • When students prepare for tests set them to teacher guided and remember after the test to set them back to teacher controlled.
  • At the end of the course set the topic filters to student controlled.
  • Tick the topics you have taught to date (not the one you are currently teaching) and put reminders in your calendar to unlock new topics as they are taught throughout the course.

Engaging students

Students would much prefer to have complete control over their topic filters! Tell them why that is not such a good idea. They need to trust Smart Revise to choose questions and topics that the data say they need to work on in a spaced and interleaved way. This is the best method for long-term memory retention.

Why using Quiz is better than Tasks for recall activities

Recap the entire course to date with Quiz.

Tasks is the go-to mode for many teachers. It makes perfect sense as it reflects classic teaching methods. You set a task based on what you taught last lesson, the students complete it, marking happens and then you review the outcomes. Although Smart Revise is a sandbox system and teachers are free to use its features in any way they see fit, there are better ways to create recap and recall activities than setting Tasks.

The difference between Tasks and Quiz

  1. Tasks need to be set by the teacher every time you want to use them. Quiz only requires the teacher to tick one new box in the class topic filters after a new topic has been taught.
  2. Selecting only relevant questions based on what you taught last lesson from within a topic when creating a Task is time consuming.
  3. The students all get the same questions in a Task. This removes the opportunity for automatic personalisation, differentiation and intervention that Quiz provides by selecting the most pertinent questions for each student focussing on their individual knowledge gaps.
  4. Setting a Task containing only questions on a narrow body of knowledge creates what is known as “blocking”. Studies have shown that causing the brain to context switch between topics on a larger body of knowledge growing over time, known as “interleaving”, has more impact.
  5. A Task has a defined number of questions resulting in some students finishing early and having nothing to do while they wait for their peers. Quiz prevents this from happening by presenting more questions from a priority queue. With Quiz the teacher chooses when to stop the activity.

    Effective recall activities

    Recapping knowledge from only a couple of the most recently taught lessons using a Task can be illustrated like this:

    Illustration of recapping knowledge from a previous lesson only.

    Instead, recapping knowledge from everything taught so far can be illustrated as:

    Recapping content across the whole course.

    Committing knowledge to long term memory requires addressing the forgetting curve, and not simply recapping knowledge from recently taught lessons. Of course it is impossible to recap everything during a single lesson, so the situation is more nuanced. Quiz will always choose the questions that are most relevant to each student focussing on:

    • Questions that have never been seen before from newly taught topics first.
    • Questions that have been answered incorrectly most recently and frequently.
    • Questions that have not been asked for some time, creating “spaced learning”.

    Spotting misconceptions

    Misconceptions can be spotted using the Questions Analysis report. Use the topic filters on the report to home in on particular topics. As students begin to answer these questions correctly, the top 10 questions will change dynamically. Tasks will give you a snapshot in time, which is great initially, but adds little value later. Use Quiz for recall and Tasks for key assessment points instead.

    How to set this up for students

    Every time you have finished teaching a topic unlock it for students using the class settings, topic filters. Do not lock the previously taught topics or select a topic you are currently teaching. The number of unlocked topics should increase from one to them all as you progress through the course.

    Why you should start every computer science lesson in years 10 to 13 with Smart Revise Quiz

    Book cover: The Revision Revolution by Helen Howell and Ross Morrison McGill.

    Imagine this scenario. You’ve just taught the topic of computer architecture including the purpose of the registers. In class students engaged in answering questions, completed activities and it was a good lesson.

    At the start of their next lesson as a recap activity you ask a student in the class, “what was the purpose of the program counter?” The blank face looks back at you. “How can you not know?” you think to yourself, “we only covered this last week.”

    Be honest, this happens in your classroom, doesn’t it? The reality is that since your last lesson those students have been bombarded with new information from English, Maths and Science, their short-term memory can only handle so much.

    Does it really matter you might ask. After all, when you get to the end of the course you engage in revision and bring all that knowledge back to the fore; but what if there was a better way to learn? What if students could be more confident, more engaged and perform better in tests, mock exams and real exams if they retained more of what you’d taught them over a longer period of time? What if revision at the end of a course benefits the most privileged learners, but does not help the less privileged in the same way? This classic approach to teaching is actually contributing to the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.

    The better, more successful way

    This better way is, “The Revision Revolution” where revision is seen as integral to the learning process. It’s a feature of every lesson. From the very first topic to the very last.

    Howell, H, Morrison McGill, R (2022) The Revision Revolution, John Catt.

    At its heart revision is about repetition, and the best revision starts early, not at the end of the course. Imagine preparing to run a marathon. Do runners prepare by starting to run 26 miles a few weeks before the event? Of course not. They build up greater distances and stamina over months, if not years of preparation. Running almost every day. Why then should preparing for examinations be any different?

    Why not give all students, not just the privileged a better chance of success with an opportunity to recall what they have been learning over and over again in every lesson? Better than that, why not include in that repetition the respected learning theories: spacing, interleaving and personalisation.

    It’s pretty obvious. If we don’t regularly recall something we forget it. This is known as the forgetting curve. However, the more we practice, the more we repeat, the more we remember and the more confident we feel.

    You might be thinking, “where do I find the time to go back over what I’ve already taught?” The solution is surprising simple. The start of lessons and homework.

    Regular recall practice through multiple choice quizzing is in vogue right now and is a key feature in the classrooms of the most successful schools.

    The research is clear, regular repetition aids memory retention.

    Murre, J., Dros, J. (2015) Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve.

    The Smarter way

    This is where Smart Revise adds significant value. So named because it is a smarter way to revise. Start every lesson with 7 minutes of recall practice with Quiz. It’s low-stakes so it’s easy to get student buy-in. If you have Craig’n’Dave starter activities for GCSE these are good for engagement on entry, but they are for schools who don’t have Smart Revise. Retrieval practice has more impact because it’s based on academic research.

    Smart Revise will automatically space questions so that there is an appropriate gap between students seeing the same question again (repetition). It will interleave questions, that is selecting questions from different topics causing the brain to context switch which has a bigger impact on retention. With built-in personalisation questions answered incorrectly are shown again more frequently until the knowledge sticks.

    Classic starter activities are one-size-fits-all. Smart Revise provides a differentiated activity for every learner.

    How to set this up for students

    1. Every time you have finished teaching a topic unlock it for students using the class settings, topic filters. Do not lock the previously taught topics or select a topic you are currently teaching. The number of unlocked topics should increase from one to them all as you progress through the course.
    2. Get students into the habit of entering the classroom, logging on and starting Smart Revise Quiz for themselves at the start of every year 10, 11, 12 and 13 lesson. There is no preparation for the teacher to do.
    3. Spend about 7 minutes on Smart Revise. This is an optimal time. The Quiz will never end, it will just loop questions in a priority queue so that the teacher can stop the activity when they are ready for the main lesson.

    Ideally students would also use Smart Revise Quiz for homework too. Aim for 35 questions a week at GCSE (including those done in lessons) and 60 for A level. The flight path on the student’s dashboard will show them if they are on track. Teachers can monitor this with the analytics usage report and see strengths and weaknesses in the question analysis and class matrix reports too.

    Students will tell you what the purpose of the program counter is with confidence because Smart Revise will have asked them often enough!

    AQA A level content update

    Student practicing exams

    The latest update to the AQA A level 7517 course brings an additional 186 all new, original “Advance” questions to Smart Revise, worth a total of 627 marks.

    The new questions all requiring written answers from students span the entire course, increasing the available content for every topic. There is a good mix of one to twelve mark questions that include a range of the different command words: state, give, describe, explain, compare and more. Some questions are straightforward while many are taxing to target the full grade range of A*-E.

    Questions are provided with mark schemes offering opportunities for self-guided marking, peer marking and AI marking too.

    As always, these are original questions, not from past papers, giving students lots of additional practice material beyond what is provided by AQA Exampro. All the questions have been written by Alan Harrison an experienced teacher, computer science author and examiner, verified by Craig and Dave.

    Available to students through Advance mode (if enabled by the teacher), and also for teachers to use when setting Tasks. New questions will be automatically interleaved with all the existing content providing one huge question bank.

    Task management update

    Teacher working on laptop

    These improvements make it much easier for a teacher to see all their tasks and what they need to do to complete the workflow for each task. The improvements include:

    • See how many students have submitted each task on one screen without having to manually expand the details of each task.
    • Sort the task list by name, availability, deadline, submissions, marking and task status.
    • Each task now has a status indicating what action is required for that task to be completed. If there is only one action available, for example releasing marks to students that is the status that is shown.
    • The most important final action is shown with a hot pink background. For example, releasing marks to students updates their flight path with data from the task.
    • “Commit marks” has been replaced with a more intuitive, “Marks can be released” action.
    • The “Tidy up” button has been replaced with a more intuitive, “Archive tasks” button.
    • Archived tasks are not shown by default but can be expanded with one click / tap.
    • Tasks can now be archived and unarchived at any time.
    • Once marks have been released to students, a task can be assigned back to the student to be done again.
    • Tasks always remain active until the teacher chooses to archive them. The mark book is now a report and not the final stage in the task workflow.
    Task management interface

    Individual task management

    Improvements to the individual task management interface include:

    • A cleaner look to match the class task management interface.
    • See what action is waiting to be completed for, or by each student.
    • See the date and time a student submitted a task.
    • See the questions that were included in the task.
    Task management interface
    Task topics and questions

    More updates

    Also included in this release are a number of other improvements. These include:

    • Bug fix: Tasks containing Quiz questions did not always render HTML correctly for superscripts.
    • Teachers can now change the course start date for student flight paths.
    • The “View previous answer” button on Advance has been moved so that it is available before the student has answered the question. This allows them to compare their last answer and use it as a template to write a new improved answer to the question. This does not affect Tasks.
    • A new link has been added to the user profile options to navigate to the domain whitelist helpdesk page making it easier to find which domains need to be whitelisted for Smart Revise to work in a school setting.
    • When students join a class the DPA message has been changed to make it more explicit that the school will become the data controller and not CraignDave Ltd.

    New case studies for AQA & OCR Business

    Case studies

    Our support for the GCSE Business specifications continues with the addition of 167 new exam-style Advance questions that can also be included in a task.

    OCR (J204) Case Studies:

    • Crystal Charm:
      A small business that specialises in selling crystals and other spiritual items.
    • Coffee House:
      A partnership that sells freshly brewed coffee, tea and hot chocolate from a mobile trailer.
    • D and G Honey:
      A small business harvesting and packaging honey from Lithuania.
    • Primark
      The high street fashion retailer that operates in over 15 countries with over 400 stores across Europe and the US.
    • McDonalds:
      The famous American-based multinational fast food chain, founded in 1940.
    • Sephora:
      A French beauty and skincare retailer.
    • Joules:
      Established in Britain by Tom Joule nearly three decades ago, Joules is a premium lifestyle brand with an authentic heritage.

    AQA (8132) Case Studies:

    • Primark:
      The high street fashion retailer that operates in over 15 countries with over 400 stores across Europe and the US.
    • Bill’s Kitchen:
      A mobile catering unit selling homemade pizzas.
    • Tim Hortons:
      A Canadian restaurant started to open in the UK in 2017.
    • Furniture Village Bromley:
      A small business restoring and selling mid-century furniture.

    New feature: student flight path

    Student piloting an aeroplane

    Every day that a student uses Smart Revise it records their overall percentage progress on that day. Teachers can see patterns for individual students and whether they are on target.

    On the new-look student course homepage students will immediately see a simplistic graph of where they have come from, where they are now and where they are heading, together with a green target cone. By selecting “Expand” students can see a more detailed daily breakdown and the impact of each revision session.

    The light green target cone can be customised in three ways: the date when progress should begin, the minimum percentage completion by the date of the first exam, and an aspirational goal. These three factors create the target cone. Teachers can customise the values for the whole class or for individual students. If a student belongs to a class, they can see their targets but cannot change them. Students that are not in a class can set their own targets.

    One possibility might be to set the percentages to match minimum and aspirational grades being aimed for using the published grade boundaries from examination bodies. For example, a minimum target grade 5 might be 50% with an aspiration of a grade 7 at 70%. The default values are a minimum of 50% and aspiration of 80%.

    However, be mindful that although evidence has shown there is a strong correlation between exam success and use of Smart Revise, completion and accuracy does not necessarily equate to a particular exam grade.

    Teachers can see all the flight paths for their class be selecting the course, class, analytics, flight paths. By selecting “Load full data” the daily breakdown for a student can be seen.

    To set the target cone start date and end of course targets for the whole class, select Configure on the class list page and the flight path tab.

    To set the target cone start date and end of course targets for an individual student, select Manage student on the class list.

    Improved Edexcel 1CP2 Computer Science course

    The update also includes changes to all the mark schemes. Multiple choice answers have been revised to either be diagnostic or to match course key words. Terms definitions have been updated to match the precise wording in the specification where necessary.

    To ensure the correct scope we used the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) Computer Science Getting Started Guide and crossed referenced this with the official published scheme of learning PowerPoint slides.

    We noticed that the slides contain significantly more detail than is required by the specification, which is important for context when you are teaching, but can be unhelpful when revising. We have taken a pragmatic approach with this to ensure all the subject specific terminology from the getting started guide is included but not the additional pink words in the scheme of learning. This should ensure the best focus for students.

    This update does not include longer answer Advance questions, but we are turning our attention to these next. We anticipate the same level of forensic investigation and tweaking in addition to lots of new questions in the style of real examination papers.

    The update is already live for 2025, 2026 and 2027 courses. There is nothing for the teacher to do. The next time students log in and select the course they will be advised there is new content.

    There were some situations where it was not possible to completely update the year 11 (2025) course due to its legacy structure in the system. However the year 10 (2026) course is the best one yet. There are also some implications for the analytics reports for year 11 that will now be out of date, but they will rectify themselves the more that students use the system.

    Our thanks to Tim Brady, the subject advisor at Pearson for his support with this update.

    Shortlisted in the Teach Secondary Awards 2024

    Teach Co Awards 2024 logo

    Smart Revise has been shortlisted as one of the top six assessment tools for secondary education alongside Collins GCSE exam skills, Hodder Education Boost insights, Performance Learning Ed Tech coaching programme, SAM Learning and Speech & Language Link.

    See the full shortlist for all categories.

    Smart Revise has been previously shortlisted as a finalist in the Bett Awards 2022, Teach Secondary Awards 2022, ERA Awards 2023 and now the Teach Secondary Awards 2024.

    We are thrilled that the judges have recognised Smart Revise as a market leader in raising attainment for students of Computer Science / Business and an essential tool for reducing workload for teachers of those subjects too.