Why have I received an e-mail saying that one or more of my students need attention?

Why have I received an e-mail saying that one or more of my students need attention?

What does this message mean?

Occasionally, a student isn't able to achieve the 85% accuracy pass mark in a list in Supershark, (automatic progression) but to maintain motivation they are automatically moved on when they have reached the maximum cycle of games for a list. The teacher will receive these messages for students where they have moved on but not achieved the pass mark for:

  • The individual lists within a unit
  • The ‘revise unit’ test
  • The ‘revision to the end of unit’ test

The individual lists have more practice than the revision lists. An individual list will have completed the maximum of four cycles of six games before they are moved on automatically, so this is probably the most important to check for repeated errors/misunderstandings.

The ‘revise unit’ will have been offered twice, with some practice games in between. This revision test will be randomly selected words from the unit they have just completed.   

The ‘revision to the end of the unit’ is designed to give them practice/overlearning from earlier lists.  It is a single test, given every third unit.  The test consists of randomly selected words from several of the previous units, up to and including the current list.

Checking a student's results

Take a look at the ‘Group Summary Report’ to give you a quick view of the student’s progress. Clicking on the link under their name will take you to their individual unit progress report. This will identify which individual lists need more attention. See Progress Reports.

Ways to help the student/s

Do consider that a less able speller may greatly benefit from discussion on a particular letter pattern, spelling concept or rule which has caused the difficulty. Otherwise, where a student has difficulty you have several options:

  1. Check their progress report for Supershark and identify the list(s) that have caused difficulty. Click on the error column with hyperlink to see the actual mistakes they have made. Once they understand the teaching point, find a suitable list(s) from the published courses (or create your own) to set as work. Advise on setting work can be found here while advice on creating own lists as set work is here.
Other possibilities: 
  1. You could – after going over the teaching point with them - move the student back within Supershark – to repeat the unit or an alternative unit but only if you feel this would not be demotivating. See how to 'Change Level - Supershark'.
  2. Turn Free Play on for the student to allow them to access the same lists in the Wordshark course so they can get more practice before continuing in Supershark. See here for more information. (You can edit the available courses from the ‘Manage Group’ section and 'Turn off/on courses)  Unlike the Supershark course and set work, free play doesn’t currently enforce any spell check games so a student needs actively to select one of the games; spell check, maze spell check or moving spell check. As the progress reports are based on these games if a student hasn’t played one, the unit and word list reports won’t reflect any data. In this case you would need to check the ‘Game Play’ report. This will give details of all games played, dates and times of games played along with scores and number of errors.



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