How to check for careful reading from the activity history timeline

In Sparx Reader, we want students to develop and enhance their skills at careful reading where they are fully immersed in the story. We don't want students skim reading or trying to just find a way to answer the questions, so we've designed the answer history timeline to give a detailed view of the reading that a student has done for a particular homework. This is available via the Hand-in page, and will support you in identifying whether careful reading is happening or where students might need support on this.

You will get a breakdown of key information about each question check, and attempt including:

• The SRP they were awarded
• How many attempts they have had at a question check
• How long they spent reading during each attempt, and if they were warned for reading too quickly.

You can use this to have informed and meaningful conversations with students about their reading activity, including for queries such as:

• "My homework is taking too long"
• "I'm not getting enough SRP"

Below we'll run through some examples of student behaviour that you can be looking out for.

Students are skipping straight to the questions 

In the screenshot below, you'll see an example of a student that has extremely low reading time (a few seconds for a few hundred words). This will result in them being warned that they have read too quickly, and will be expected to get 4/4 questions correct to pass the check. The red exclamation in this view tells you the student received this warning.

By failing the check, the student will be awarded 0 SRP, and be expected to re-read the section before attempting the questions again. We will expect them to get 4/4 again, as they have now seen the questions, and we don't want them to use this information to their advantage and skim through the text for relevant detail.

Students are reading too quickly

In the screenshot below, you'll see an example of a student that is not obviously skipping the text, but perhaps skimming the text a bit too much, so has been flagged as reading too quickly again. However, they might just need to slow down a bit and read a bit more carefully in order to answer the questions correctly.

Careful, meaningful reading

You can also use this page to call out great examples of careful, meaningful reading. In this example, a student is consistently passing their question checks first time, getting most or all questions correct. This results in them earning maximum available Sparx Reader points, and will mean their homework takes the expected amount of time.