Skip to main content

Personal Practice

This article describes the Personal Practice task, an optional personalised task available to students in Sparx Maths homework.

Personal Practice is a section available to students to generate personalised additional tasks on demand. This is an optional task for students to use.

What is Personal Practice


Introduction

Personal Practice is a section available to students to create small, personalised tasks for them to do some optional, additional practise outside of their set homework.

Personal Practice tasks are 10 questions long, and using the homework algorithm, creates the task using the following rules:

  • Topics seen in homework, but specific skills they may not have covered yet

  • Questions they have previously struggled on in homework

  • Revisiting older topics seen earlier in the academic year

As soon as students have been set their first homework on Sparx Maths, they will be able to create these tasks whenever they like.

There is also a variety of reporting available for teachers to see how students are interacting with these tasks, highlighted below in this article.

How do students access Personal Practice

Students can access Personal Practice at any time by selecting it from the main menu when logged into Sparx Maths.

Students can click on Start new to create a new 10 question task, or alternatively, they will see historic tasks underneath and their progress. The arrow allows them to go back into this task to continue working on it.

The activity history view inside the student app will also show Personal Practice tasks.

How teachers can monitor student's usage of Personal Practice


Via the Hand-in page

  • The Hand-in page shows a column, which will contain the number of questions answered correctly in Personal Practice tasks between the hand out and hand in dates.

  • Clicking on this number will take you to the student profile, and filter the activity view to just Personal Practice tasks, where you can then see their activity on each of the tasks and the answer history.

  • Note: Each task contains 10 questions

Via a student profile

  • Going to the students profile, you'll see an activity feed at the bottom of the summary tab (you can also get here by clicking on the number on the hand in page).

  • This feed shows each Personal Practice task the student has created, including correct questions and with a link to view their answer history.

Via the XP Report page

Students earn 150XP for each full set of questions (each task) that they complete within Personal Practice.

On the Student Rewards page, the 'Personal Practice XP' column shows how much XP students have earned using Personal Practice over the selected timeframe. XP earned in Personal Practice will also be included in the total XP column. To access the Student Rewards page:

  1. Go to 'Reporting' → 'Student rewards'

  2. Click on 'View table' under the 'XP report' section

Coming soon: Via the Student Activity Report

By September '26, you will be able to see the number of questions answered within the Student activity report for a given week.

Frequently asked questions


Are students limited to how often they can use this?

No. Students can continue to create personalised practice tasks, although will not be able to continue to create them continually until they complete some that have already been created.

How long do these tasks last?

A Personal Practice task is available for 4 months after it is created, after which we archive it to keep the students history page neat.

How difficult are these tasks

Tasks are generated using the same algorithm we use to generate homework. Therefore these tasks will be at a similar, personalised level.

Some students may see questions they struggled on in previous homework, in order to practise them again, but they should still be at an appropriate level.

Did this answer your question?