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11 Apr 2019

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Smart practice makes perfect! New app feature to help students retain knowledge

With the new smart practice feature in our app, students can ace difficult questions from previously played kahoots, remember content better, and also collect emotes as a reward.

Our mobile app extends fun, game-based learning beyond the classroom and a live Kahoot! experience. With our challenge feature, you can assign kahoots as homework and track learners’ progress in real time. Using the app, students can easily make their own quizzes, taking the lead on learning content and developing their creative and research skills.

Now, we’ve added a new feature to help students better retain knowledge they obtained in class, restudy difficult questions, and be able to retrieve those learnings many weeks after content was taught. Smart practice, as we named this feature, will be especially handy during review and test prep season. Find out how it works and what learning methods smart practice is powered with.

How smart practice works

Learners can access smart practice after playing a live kahoot or a challenge where they answered some questions incorrectly. They will be prompted to start it when a game is completed.

Completing smart practice step by step, they’ll eventually ace the kahoot by remembering all correct answers. Step 1 can be played any time after the initial game. The learner will be taken through questions answered incorrectly until they score 100%. Step 2 will unlock 24 hours later, and step 3 – another 48 hours after that. The app will remind learners once the next step is ready to play.

On both these steps, a learner replays the original kahoot with order of answers randomized until they ace all questions.

Practicing the content in short rounds distributed in time will help learners remember content of the kahoot better, and retain it for a longer time.

Why are there intervals between steps in smart practice?

Smart practice is based on two learning methods: spacing and testing.

Spacing helps us retain information and concepts better if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions, rather than one “bulk” session. Effect of spacing is backed by extensive research in psychology.

The term “testing effect” comes from cognitive psychology, too. Its definition is that knowledge retention is improved by using tests to retrieve information during the learning process. In this case, frequent testing or quizzing has nothing to do with scores – it’s a learning tool that helps students find out what they don’t know yet and need to study more.

So, with smart practice, replaying questions from a kahoot brings up the testing effect, and, with steps distributed in time, it’s enhanced with the spacing effect to maximize knowledge retention.

We’ll take a deeper dive into these effects and the science behind them in our upcoming posts. Read this article from learning expert Olav Schewe to learn more about spacing and testing.

Smart practice comes with a reward

By acing kahoots, learners can collect rewards – emotes! These are animated reactions with different characters that players can use to express themselves in challenges. On top of learning impact, collecting emotes adds more motivation to complete smart practice, especially for young learners. (Though we’ll admit, when we were testing the feature internally, many of us got quite obsessed about collecting all emotes!)
Improve knowledge retention with the smart practice in the Kahoot! app

Try out smart practice in our app on iOS or Android and encourage your students to use it. We hope that by acing kahoots they’ll be prepared to ace their tests, and, what’s most important, retain knowledge they gained via playing Kahoot! for a long time.

Test smart practice yourself and get a chance to win prizes for your entire class! To join, you need to play our challenge and ace this kahoot with smart practice:

Spring ahead! sweepstake

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