A Student's Guide to the New Student Dashboard

We’ve spent the last six months at Mathspace researching, testing and developing a new student experience that gives students a clear understanding of what you should work on to maximize your growth. Watch this short video for an explanation of the changes:

There are 3 key changes:

• New Skills Reports
• New Personalized Recommendations
• New approach to Adaptive tasks

New Skills Reports

The Skills view help provide a clear learning path by grouping related skills into a ‘Learning Focus’. This allows you to focus your learning on areas that support what you are doing in class.
You will see recommended practice tasks on your Dashboard based on your diagnostic check-ins for your selected ‘Learning Focus’. Whenever you start work on a new area Mathspace will ask you if they want to change your ‘Learning Focus’

When to use Skills View vs Textbook view

The view you choose will depend on the type of practice you are looking to complete.
The Textbook view is best when exploring and practicing grade level work directly related to what you are working on in class.
The Skills View is best when looking to strengthen understanding and grow in a particular topic area (your learning focus) from both current and prior grade levels.

	Textbook	Skills
Structure	All topic areas across one grade level	One topic area (Learning Focus) across multiple grade levels
When to use	to explore and practice grade level content, e.g. for revision	To fill in any gaps in prior understanding to help with current classwork
Reporting	Mastery based on adaptive tasks & recommended practice	Proficiency based on periodic check-ins across the entire curriculum
Reporting Unit	Subtopic within Textbook	Curriculum Outcome/Standard
Badge

New Personalized Recommendations

Recommended tasks are Adaptive tasks from the Mathspace Textbook that are related to your Learning Focus. They target prior skills necessary to excel at topic areas assigned by your teacher. They are tagged with one of three categories:

• Ready to Learn: you have mastered all prior concepts and are ready to learn this content.
• Almost mastered: check-ins have shown you are familiar with this content but require a little further practice.
• Recent Work: you have worked on a task, but have not yet mastered it within the Mathspace textbook.

A New Approach to Adaptive Tasks

Rather than focusing on a performance target (mastery) for ending an adaptive task, we now have a new measure for effort (stars) that will determine the right amount of work to put into an Adaptive task.

The star target is split up into 3 rounds and you’ll be asked to collect 3-5 stars per round depending on the breadth of questions in the subtopic.
Importantly, earning stars is not tied to getting the answer correct the first time. You will earn a star as long as you complete the question without using the ‘skip step’ option.

So make mistakes, use hints, watch videos and read lessons. That’s all part of the effort that goes into learning something new. But if you’re really stuck, you can use the ‘skip step’ and keep going with the task. Remember- your goal is to learn.
Note that you will still see your Mastery strength but that will not determine the length of the task.

We hope these changes make it easier for you to see the best place to spend your time on Mathspace to grow in your learning journey.