. I require my students to spend 50 minutes per week on memrise. The study time as reported in group stats is very often not correct for my students (who are paranoid and are timing themselves) Can you give me an idea of how the time stat is recorded? Is it different between the app and the website? Does it record time for certain reasons? I have some students with the problem on the app and some on the website. So, I have been unable to rule out one or the other. I know that it gathers for a 30 day period, but we just started a new course and it recorded only a handful of minutes for most students who had already completed a half hour. Any thoughts?
As far as I can tell, on the website, Memrise counts time when you’re on a learning screen or reviewing screen (unless you’ve paused it.) These pages end in: /garden/learn/, garden/review/, and /garden/review_level/. Time spent the “Session Complete” screen doesn’t count. Obviously, time spent looking at course lists, lesson lists, forums, etc doesn’t count.
I don’t like using the app, so I can’t comment on how it counts learning & reviewing time. I’d expect it to be similar, though.
I can’t think of a more ridiculous requirement for a teacher to set for their students.
A teacher’s goal should be to have the students learn facts and develop skills. If a student learns quickly, and has the ability to learn the required material in 20 minutes per week, why should they slow down their own learning, and be forced to waste their time on a website or with an app, just to satisfy your arbitrary 50 minute requirement?
Beyond the ridiculousness of your requirement itself, is the fact that you are using an extremely buggy and unreliable website and app as a measure of your students’ work. Nothing about memrise or its reported statistics is reliable. People routinely lose their study-streak statistics, lose their “Pro” status, and have their correct answers marked as incorrect due to numerous bugs in the software.
I don’t know what age your students are, but if one of your students were my child, I would immediately complain to your school about the fact that you are subjecting my child to such an unfair, inaccurate, and counterproductive requirement.
I wrote for help. If you aren’t going to be helpful, stay out of it. You have no idea what you are talking about and no point of reference about what I am doing.
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My statement that Memrise statistics are inaccurate, unreliable, and totally unsuitable as a tool for measuring students’ work is accurate, on topic, and completely appropriate. My comment is also helpful to alert you, your students, and perhaps their parents to the inappropriateness of using memrise in its present state, for the purpose you are trying to use it for.
I know that you don’t want to hear what I said, but this is not your classroom, and I am not one of your students, who you can tell to be quiet, and “stay out of it.”
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Thank you for your help.
@DMSSPANISH : I think that Memrise is calculating this at one minute of learning time per vocab item - based on a quick calculation of the indicated study hours vs. vocab items in my Spanish courses.
I think that a more realistic figure might typically be about two minutes per item but this clearly depends on the complexity of the material, and the aptitude and previous knowledge of the learner.
Another factor is that the learner is going to be continually re-learning the material - so the error rate will gradually drop as the learner plugs away at a course. So it’s not very precise.
Good luck to you and your students!
P.S. I would recommend that your 50 minute suggestion would work well with a study method called the Pomodoro technique that breaks self-study into 25 minute sessions (with a 5 minute break). I think that all students should try this out! The technique is summarized in a 5 minute YouTube video - but I wouldn’t recommend the use of kitchen timer in a library!
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. That makes more sense. I am a CI teacher (comprehensible input) So, I shelter the vocabulary introduction in my classroom, however I send my students to a high school that is traditionally a legacy (textbook/grammar) type of instruction. Memrise has been my way of introducing more vocabulary that they will need at the high school and I do find a great deal of it filtering into my classroom. I ask them to spend 10 minutes a day, five days a week on their vocabulary lesson, most do it on their bus rides to and/or from school, but there are many that save it until the last minute and do it all in one chunk. I will check out this technique. Thanks!
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From my experience as an amateur language learner, I think that learning foreign language vocab using Memrise complements the comprehensible input approach very well. It’s what I try to do myself, and has been quite successful for me personally.
I think that actively learning vocabulary in the (English -> Foreign) direction turbocharges the subsequent foreign language acquisition that takes place when reading and listening to the foreign language. It simply makes the comprehensible input approach much more effective.
(@xvg11: flagging isn’t my type, but i’ve been really tempted this time… could you please try to express your disapproval in less ranting manner? that memrise stats are unreliable was exactly the original problem/question of the OP, and I strongly suspect as well that the OP also knows what her/his goals as a teacher are)
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I know that my criticism was expressed very strongly, but I don’t think it was “ranting”. But of course, I don’t want to violate any rules, so I reviewed them again, and I don’t see any that my post violates, and I don’t think that it deserves to be flagged.
Please note that the original poster finished their question with the following invitation for general comments on the topic: “Any thoughts?”
My response indicates my very strong disapproval of a teacher stating that “I require my students to spend 50 minutes per week on memrise”, i.e. forcing Memrise as it is now, on his/her students.
Memrise is terribly broken now, and always broken to some degree or other. The statistics have never been reliable. And the thought that some teacher is forcing their young students to use the site in this condition is appalling to me. I can’t help but express that fact. I expressed my disapproval of the teacher’s specific requirement for the students to use memrise for a certain amount of time, not criticism for the teacher in general terms.
Moreover, I think it was impolite for a poster to ask for “Any comments?” and then tell someone to “stay out of it” when they express their disagreement with something the poster said.
But I respect your opinion, and appreciate your expressing your concern to me directly rather than just hitting the flag button. Thank you.
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To clarify, you knew I was asking for information about the stats and how the timing worked. With no information about my classroom it’S structure or my teaching style you went on a rant. You have no idea how I am teaching or what is the result of my requirement or my purpose. You were in no way helpful in answering the question that I asked for thoughts on. I was trying to gather information so that I could be an informed user and as such help my students. I hope that you choose a more positive path. A teacher would never teach someone seeking knowledge the way that you treated me. You acted as if I were abominable for having students use MEMRISE. The truth is that they love MEMRISE. I just want to track them effectively. I wish you well.
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Thank you.
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+1
They pointed out the mistake of trusting the broken “statistics” that Memrise gives you.
If you want to track your students, make a screenshot everyday of the course leaderboard. If the numbers are increasing most everyday you are good.
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Hi: @DMSSPANISH
About a year ago, I stumbled across a short online document by Bryce Hedstrom in which he lists the Spanish verb conjugations contained in the most common 505 words of the Wiktionary subtitles frequency list.
http://www.brycehedstrom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/VERBS-IN-THE-TOP-505-SPANISH-WORDS.pdf
Since that time, I’ve created a group of Memrise courses (three so far) that covers all the conjugated verb forms contained in the first 3000 words of the Wiktionary list. I was thinking that these courses might be useful to some of your more enthusiastic students:
Great! Thank you so much for sharing! Bryce Hedstrom has great information. I follow his blog. These are very useful!