WHAT IS PRACTEZ?

Think Fitbit for classroom learning:
providing the steady, daily practice students need to build mastery, and the real-time data educators need to drive effective instruction (all without adding to their workload).

↓  In detail

WHAT IS PRACTEZ?

PractEZ is a WhatsApp-native classroom assistant that:

• helps students reinforce what's taught in class through bite-sized independent practice, and
• provides teachers real-time insights into student learning with data from their practice sessions.

WHERE THINGS STAND

With concerted efforts the issue of enrolment has broadly been solved, and there is evidence of growth in the learning levels in the foundational grades.

What hasn't held is everything after them.

In mathematics, the national average falls from 60% in Grade 3 to 37% in Grade 9. PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024

Maybe what's missing is not more, but better instruction.

↓  The numbers

WHERE THINGS STAND

98.1% of children aged 6–14 are enrolled, and enrolment has held above 95% for close to two decades. Getting children into school is no longer the question.

Learning levels in the foundational grades are improving too. Std III reading has recovered its pandemic losses entirely, and Std III arithmetic is at its highest in a decade.

Systemic intervention works.

WHERE THINGS STAND

But the gains stop at the foundational grades. As the curriculum gets harder, attainment against it falls away.

Mathematics, national average:
60% in Grade 3. 46% in Grade 6. 37% in Grade 9. PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024

Against an elementary three-digit by one-digit division problem, ASER finds that more than half of Std VIII still cannot do it!

WHERE THINGS STAND: SOURCES

• ASER 2024 (Annual Status of Education Report), ASER Centre — rural India, one-on-one oral assessment of children aged 5–16 in 19 languages, methodology unchanged since 2006.
• PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024, NCERT — school-based competency assessment of 2,115,022 children in Grades 3, 6 and 9, across 74,229 schools in 781 districts, all school management types.
• Enrolment and out-of-school figures, ages 6–14, ASER 2024.
• NIPUN Bharat Mission and Foundational Literacy and Numeracy directives under NEP 2020 — 83% of schools reporting directives, 78% reporting a trained teacher.

WHY PRACTICE

“Practice makes perfect” — that old folk maxim — is also what the NCF asks for, and what cognitive science is unusually settled on: practice is what turns a lesson watched into a capacity held.

But at a pupil–teacher ratio of 30:1, creating and grading even two questions per student per day is over 6,000 pieces of work in a year. Per subject. Per teacher.

Practice must repeat. Teacher workload must not.

↓  The evidence

WHY PRACTICE

A student can follow every step of a proof on the board and still not reproduce it tomorrow. Watching is not the same as being able.

And to close this gap, the NCF asks for regular, deliberate practice because a capacity only counts once it is repeatable. Once a procedure runs without effort, the mind is free for the harder thinking above it.

WHY PRACTICE

Cognitive science adds that retrieval practice is among the most reliable ways to make learning last. Retrieving does not merely reveal what is stored. It changes what is stored.

Retrieval practice is itself a potent learning event. Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015

WHY PRACTICE

And such practice does not have to wait on a motivated student. A study following 1,478 children through Grades 1 to 4 found that:

Achievement predicted intrinsic motivation… However, intrinsic motivation did not predict achievement at any time. Garon-Carrier et al., 2016

Success is what produces the will to continue, which makes regular, achievable practice the entry point to engagement, not something that waits on it.

WHY PRACTICE

What moves outcomes, Middha notes, is the working-alone time. Students who study regularly after school perform 0.37 levels higher in reading and 0.23 higher in mathematics than those who never do. Direct parental help, checking notebooks and the like, shows only a weak effect. Middha, UCL, 2022

WHY PRACTICE

You've finished a class. You want to know what landed and what didn't; two independent questions for each student, every day. Imagine:

Ten students: twenty to set, twenty to grade.
Forty students: eighty and eighty.
Every teaching day.

Across some 200 working days, that is nearly 6,000.

WHY PRACTICE — SOURCES

• National Curriculum Framework for School Education, NCERT, 2023 — practice as the route to capacities, deliberate practice, mastery.
• Soderstrom, N. C. & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176–199.
• Bjork, R. & Bjork, E. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. JARMAC.
• Garon-Carrier, G. et al. (2016). Intrinsic motivation and achievement in mathematics in elementary school: a longitudinal investigation of their association. Child Development, 87(1), 165–175. 1,478 Canadian children, Grades 1–4.
• Middha, M. (2022). The nature of parental involvement and its impact on learning outcomes in Sitapur district, India. UCL.
• NCF curricular time allocation — ~135 teaching hours a year.

WHY DATA

You put in earnest effort in class every day. Wouldn't you want it to have had the most effect?

But which of it landed, you learn too late — a unit test arrives after the chapter has closed and the class has moved on. By then, the data is hindsight, not guidance.

What the practice reveals has to come back before the next lesson, without additional teacher work.

↓  The evidence

WHY DATA

Information is only formative if it reaches the teacher while the lesson is still live. Later than that, it is a record rather than a decision.

WHY DATA

Nor can it be read off the room. Coe calls visible activity and engagement poor proxies for learning — a class that follows along today is weak evidence of a class that will remember any of it tomorrow.

What we can observe and measure is performance. Soderstrom & Bjork, 2015

And performance is not learning.

WHY DATA

So how well does a teacher know what their students can actually do?

Teachers correctly identified the reading level of about 55% of their students. Four in ten did worse than a coin toss. Wadmare et al., 2022 — 1,823 teachers, 16,360 children, 848 schools

Of the students they believed could read a simple story, more than 70% could not read even words.

WHY DATA

This is not a handful of teachers, nor a handful of schools. The misjudgement is spread evenly right across the sample.

Nor is it explained by qualification, experience or salary — none of those predicted accuracy at all. What did was workload. Every additional grade a teacher taught made an accurate reading of their students 1.3 percentage points less likely.

The load is the variable, not the teacher.

WHY DATA

Which settles what the answer cannot be. If load is what erodes a teacher's read of their class, then asking them to watch more closely only adds to the load.

What is needed is information that does not depend on noticing — gathered while the students work, and back in the teacher's hands before the next lesson.

Not a sharper eye. A shorter loop.

WHY DATA

NEP 2020 asks for exactly this shift, from end-of-term judgment to continuous formative assessment. It has been asked for before.

CCE arrived with the RTE Act in 2009 and was abandoned in many states — defeated by administrative burden, large classes and an overloaded curriculum. The obstacles were never pedagogical.

WHY DATA — SOURCES

• Coe, R., Aloisi, C., Higgins, S. & Major, L. (2014). What Makes Great Teaching? Sutton Trust — “poor proxies for learning”.
• Wadmare, P., Nanda, M., Sabates, R., Sunder, N. & Wadhwa, W. (2022). Understanding the accuracy of teachers' perceptions about low achieving learners in primary schools in rural India. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 3, 100198. Sitapur district, Uttar Pradesh; baseline survey 2018–19. Reading only — the study collected no equivalent data on teachers' perceptions of numeracy.
• National Education Policy 2020 — the shift from end-of-term judgment to continuous formative assessment.
• Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 — Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, its implementation and discontinuation.

WHY TECH

So independent student practice has to recur, and what it reveals has to come back while the teaching is still live. Neither is affordable by hand.

That leaves automation. The question is what kind.

↓  The evidence

WHY TECH

The devices are already in the house.

85% of households own at least one smartphone. 72% of children have access to one. Bharat Survey for EdTech, 2023

WHY TECH

But two-thirds of that access is shared, usually a parent's phone, and only 6% of children have a device of their own. Around half have intermittent internet — almost always because the recharge ran out.

Which rules out a great deal: no app to install, no video to stream, no login to remember.

WHY TECH

WhatsApp is already the second most used learning tool in these households, at 62%, behind YouTube. The lower-tech options are not, in practice, alternatives: text messages 8%, television 7%, IVRS 7%.

The channel is already in their hands, and they already know how to work it.

WHY TECH

Education has a long record of adopting novel tools that fail on contact with the classroom.

The sensible move is to not create a new thing to learn, but to utilize what is already being used.

Not more work.

WHY TECH — SOURCES

• Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE) Report 2023, Central Square Foundation — 6,030 households and 9,867 children across six states. Device ownership, shared and dedicated access, internet intermittency, tool usage.
• Hendrick, C. Instructional Illusions — the innovation illusion, and the implementation gap between design and classroom reality.
• Cuban, L. — the adoption-to-disillusionment cycle in educational technology.