3-Read Friday #104

Assessment, tutoring, and probability

Here are three blog posts that I found interesting this week.

1. From Failure to Success: How We Transformed Our Assessment Strategy by Ben Rice

I try to break out of my maths-teacher bubble as often as possible to learn what great teachers in other subjects are doing. By replacing punishing closed-book tests with a two-part model that prioritised student success, Ben, a History teacher, discovered that achievement — not pressure — is the most powerful driver of motivation and academic growth.

2. Teaching Backwards From the Mind by Becky Allen

I love this from Becky! Using her experience as both a classroom teacher and a private tutor, she argues that effective remediation works like tutoring — diagnosing the precise shape of a student's misunderstanding through dialogue — not like reteaching curriculum chunks. And LLMs are architecturally better suited to this than most current edtech platforms allow.

3. There’s a realistic possibility you’ll read this by Adam Kucharski

One for my fellow statistics geeks here. A large-scale dataset of over 150,000 probability-language judgements reveals that people interpret the same words — like "likely" or "realistic possibility" — very differently, with frequent inconsistency even within individual responses.

Have a great weekend!

Craig

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