Author: SmartRevise

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In addition to copying a task between classes in the same year group, teachers can now copy tasks between classes in different year groups using the same “copy an existing task” function.

Topics, experience, questions and marking steps are all copied to the new task, but as the task is likely to require a different deadline the schedule step is not copied. This will allow teachers to set appropriate availability for the task for the different cohort.

Be aware that questions in courses do change as updates to specifications are made and what we learn from past papers, examiner reports or advice from subject advisors. If a question is updated, all copied tasks will pick up any changes automatically. If a question has been completely removed from Smart Revise for a subsequent course series or topic, the copied task will no longer include that question and therefore the experience may not be the same. If this happens, the teacher will be alerted when copying the task.

New questions for Advance and Tasks are being added all the time, so we encourage teachers to be mindful of this when copying a task they might have used over many years.

Irlen syndrome support

This update also includes a new theme, “Irlen” that reduces most of the colours in the system to black text on a white background. Highlights and border colours are still used where appropriate to draw attention for the user, but they do not affect the readability of the text. You can set this new theme by selecting your profile icon \ Manage Account \ Preferences \ Colour scheme.

Bug fix

When a student is unlinked from a class the teacher is no longer prompted for which action to take with a voucher if one has not been allocated to the student.

A new Terms analytics report is now available for teachers to support monthly reviews, baseline assessments and catch up planning. The “confidence” report shows you all the students in rows and all the terms in columns on one page. At the intersection the happy, neutral or sad face indicates the student’s RAG rating. You can use this report to more easily see students that need help and subject-specific terms to recap.

When control of vouchers is transferred from one teacher account to another, the new course tiles will now automatically appear on the teacher dashboard without needing to be added manually. This is great for central finance teams buying on behalf of teachers.

We have updated our terms and conditions for the purchasing, refunding and transferring of unused vouchers. The summary of the changes is:

• Any amendments to a Smart Revise order (for example, due to a reduction in student numbers) must be requested within 3 months of the order date; or the start of the academic year in cases where course vouchers have been purchased in advance for student users commencing a Smart Revise course in September.
• Course Vouchers cannot be refunded or exchanged if they have been previously allocated to a student user for 3 months or more and subsequently reclaimed; or expired.
• We will only refund or exchange vouchers that have not been allocated within the 3 month period.
• In cases where cancelling course vouchers from an order brings it below the threshold for a bulk purchase discount, the order total will be recalculated with the discount reduced/removed before a refund is applied.

In essence, please do not build up a bank of unused vouchers. Ask them to be refunded.

When we created the AQA A level (7517) course we identified 13 topics in the course specification. However, many of those topics are quite broad, covering a large range of material. By popular demand we have restructured the course from 2026 onwards to three levels of granularity exactly matching the numbering within the specification. For example:

Topic 4.1 Fundamentals of programming now has two sub-topics:

• 4.1.1 Programming
• 4.1.2 Programming paradigms

Topic 4.2 Fundamentals of data structures now has seven sub-topics:

• 4.2.1 Data structures and abstract data types
• 4.2.2 Queues
• 4.2.3 Stacks
• 4.2.5 Trees
• 4.2.6 Hash tables
• 4.2.7 Dictionaries
• 4.2.8 Vectors

Restructuring the course now means that some sub-topics are light on content. Generally, we aim for a minimum of ten Quiz questions and five Advance questions in each sub-topic. Instead of waiting until all the new content has been written we have decided to release the 2026 course now for schools that need to make purchases in the summer term and add the additional content as it becomes ready. That will amount to about 250 new questions in total.

We are pleased to announce that Alan Harrison, author of two popular books and podcast, “How to Teach Computer Science” and “How to Learn Computer Science” will be writing the new content this summer and autumn.

We should also stress that these are our minimum targets, and we hope to continually add more Advance questions to the course over time.

AQA AS level Computer Science (7516) discontinued

Due to the workload involved in restructuring the course, we have decided to discontinue the AQA AS level in Smart Revise. Only 500 candidates across the country were entered in 2023, and only a very small proportion of those were using Smart Revise. As the course is in decline, we have taken the tough decision to stop supporting it. We apologise to those students and teachers who were hoping for a 2025 AS course.

The student revision report is a great way for students and teachers to visualise current levels of understanding across the course. Each topic has its own individual pie chart for each of Quiz, Terms and Advance shown on the report.

If students have joined a class and the teacher has the topic filtering set to “student guided” or “student controlled”, a student can now select a pie chart on their report to immediately navigate to either Quiz, Terms or Advance with the topic filters automatically set to just that topic.

When students exit the mode the topic filters will return to how they were set before a pie chart was selected.

This new navigation option allows students to easily target their exam practice on questions from just one topic more easily.

Note, this option is not available if the teacher has topic filtering set to “teacher controlled”. This is important because students should ordinarily make use of the automatic question selection algorithms to ensure spacing and interleaving. When students select just one topic from their revision report this is known as “blocking” and although great for targeted practice to master topics more quickly, it is a less effective technique over the long term.

Students who have not joined a class always have the topic targeting option available.

This release also included two bug fixes:

1. Rounding errors on revision report pie chart tool tips have been fixed.
2. Terms interactive input no longer displays after switching to reflective.

Until now, questions that students answered in a Task were completely independent of the Quiz, Terms and Advance modes, including data in their analytics reports. In this update, when marks for a Task are released to the students, a routine runs to update the data in Quiz, Terms or Advance and the associated analytics reports.

Each answer is date and time stamped, so that the most recent answer a student submits and the mark for that answer is the one that will affect the reports.

Here are some scenarios:

• A student answers a question incorrectly in Quiz, but then answers it correctly in a Task. Once the marks are released to a student, the Quiz data will be updated to reflect the question being answered correctly. This will increase the mastery bar and move the question to the back of the Quiz playlist.
• A student has mastered a question in Quiz, but when the same question is subsequently set in an end of topic test, the student answers it incorrectly. This will now reset their mastery bar for that question and prioritise it in Quiz.
• For “define” questions in a Task, if the student achieves full marks, the keyword in Terms will have a green confidence assessment recorded. If the student achieves some marks, the term will be assessed as orange. If the student achieves no marks, the term will be assessed as red. This will affect the Leitner Terms deck builder.
• Answers to longer answer questions in a Task will now be recorded as a previous answer in Advance mode, changing which questions appear first.
• The analytics reports for Quiz, Terms and Advance will now include relevant data from tasks that have had marks released to students.
• In all cases, if the answer in a Task is provided before a subsequent answer is given in Quiz, Terms or Advance, that mark will not be reflected in the reports as it has been superseded by a more recent answer from the student. It is therefore important to release marks to students from a task as soon as you can.
• The analytic reports for an individual Task are unaffected by this update so you can still see the results of a single Task.

Sometimes we are asked why a Task needs the marks to be released to students, why doesn’t this happen automatically after a question has been marked?

The reason is we want to offer teachers the ability to simulate real tests and exams where the marks for a Task are released to students all at the same time. If Tasks automatically release when the marking is done, students will see their result at a different time to their classmates, depending on when their teacher (or AI) marked their work. If you prefer, it is possible for the teacher to release marks from a Task for individual students as soon as they are marked too.

Note, this update will only affect Tasks that are released to students after 19th April 2024. Previously “committed” Tasks will not run this new routine.