What’s New in Sophicly’s GCSE English Mastery Programs

Sophicly’s GCSE English Mastery Programs exist for one purpose: to help GCSE students develop a deep understanding of English.

Why?

Because it is possible to make the argument that English may very well be the most important subject out of all the ones they take at school because a student’s understanding of language shapes their understanding of everything else around them, not just in academia and work, but in everyday life.

We’re committed to providing the highest quality GCSE English mastery material possible, and, just like Google, we take an ‘always in BETA’ approach, meaning that we are constantly updating our processes and material to ensure that we are always implementing research-driven best practices as we strive towards ensuring that 100% of our students not only hit their desired goals but actually master English.

This year, we have implemented too many updates to list here but here are a few examples:

• 100s of new lessons in GCSE English language and literature
• A library with notes, templates, model answers, and more for many of the major texts
• A dashboard with quick links to the students’ resources

This month, we have been working on improving the efficiency and accuracy of our assessment processes. This is not to say that our previous assessment processes were not working – in fact, they gave us and the students detailed insights into their strengths and weaknesses which allowed us to develop further solutions for our students, however, assessing English is a notoriously demanding process and we wanted to improve the efficiency of our own processes, while also taking a step forward in terms of accuracy so that we could allocate time to continue developing in other areas, particularly resources. Here is a quick rundown of some of the updates regarding the study system and assessment sheets:

• A new updated roadmap that more accurately reflects the changes made to our GCSE English Mastery programs.
• An archive sheet where students can store all their writing, including their scrap writing
• The assessment sheets are now much more dynamic, meaning that they help the students determine how closely they have matched the criteria we have set out for them for their writing.
• The assessment sheets now incorporate metacognition which is a powerful learning technique that asks students to think more deeply about their learning than they often do otherwise.
• The assessment sheets now prioritise the major keys for the grade 9 even more, such as essay structure thus increasing efficiency and focus.

Although this may not be the most exciting update, it is one of the most important we have made recently because not only will it mean that we can allocate more time to the development of other resources that the students need to reach their goals, but it will also require them to monitor the quality of their writing to a higher level and, therefore, speed up their progress.

Other updates include the following:

• Improved audio quality in recorded videos
• New interactive video features
• Upgrade to Google Recaptch v3 allowing for a much smoother login and sign up process

Of course, there will be much more to come in the near future!