“We felt unprepared as yet for such a wide-scale roll-out,” says Artur Jackowski, who heads up the team working on the zeszyt.online platform at the heart of the project, talking about the program extension to higher grades. “The Head of the Rzewnie Commune, Mr. Wiesław Chrzanowski, ardently sought participation of his area and inclusion of older students.” He visited the University repeatedly to persuade us that we could do that. We were very skeptical at first. We realized that we had not yet been prepared to kick off with grades 7 and 8 and the platform performance had still been unsatisfactory to us and prone to errors. I remember telling the Commune Head that the outcomes might fall short of expectations. However, he would not take no for an answer and continued to push us to include grades 7 and 8 in the roll-out.

Improved learning outcomes

Historically, the student performance in mathematics has been far from the best in Rzewnie compared to other communes in the district, both for the eighth grade school-leaving exams and for the former middle school-leaving exams. In 2019, the average score on the mathematics exam was 31% in Rzewnie, placing the commune in the ninth place in the district of ten communes. The students in the pilot who had access to zeszyty.online achieved an average score of 45% on the 2020 eighth grade school-leaving exam, ranking the second in the district.

“The number of students is certainly too small to use this 14 percentage point improvement as a proxy for future outcomes of other schools,” says Artur Jackowski. “Nevertheless, this shows the potential of zeszyt.online as a significant aid in learning math if used properly.”

Positive feedback

The outcomes went beyond the direct success in the eighth grade school-leaving examination. The Faculty of Mathematics and Information Sciences has been showered with praise from the commune authorities, parents and students for enabling participation in the project and academic achievement. Over 100 positive comments were received from teachers (in and out of the Rzewnie Commune), who shared their stories how zeszyt.online had made a difference to the learning outcomes in mathematics.