WHAT IS PRACTEZ?

Think Fitbit for classroom learning:
providing the steady, daily practice students need to build mastery, and the real-time data educators need to drive effective instruction (all without adding to their workload).

WHAT IS PRACTEZ?

PractEZ is a WhatsApp-native classroom assistant that:

• helps students reinforce what's taught in class through bite-sized independent practice, and
• provides teachers real-time insights into student learning with data from their practice sessions.

WHERE THINGS STAND

Enrolment is not the problem, and has not been for two decades. 98.1% of children aged 6–14 are enrolled; 1.9% are out of school.

Getting children into a classroom is, broadly, solved.

WHERE THINGS STAND

What happens once they are in it is not.

In Std V, 48.8% can read a Std II level text. 30.7% can do a three-digit by one-digit division. ASER 2024, rural India

Fewer than half, and fewer than a third, two years before board preparation begins.

WHERE THINGS STAND

And yet the foundational grades are moving. Std III arithmetic reached 33.7% in 2024, the highest in a decade; Std III reading recovered its pandemic loss entirely.

The gains are led by government schools, narrowing the gap to private schools from 20 percentage points to 12. A national push — NIPUN Bharat, FLN directives in 83% of schools — moved the number.

Systemic intervention works.

WHERE THINGS STAND

But it stops at the foundational grades.

Std VIII basic arithmetic: 44.1% in 2018. 44.7% in 2022. 45.8% in 2024. ASER 2024

Six years, and barely a point and a half. The recovery that reached Std III has not reached the middle years.

WHERE THINGS STAND

Foundational teaching got a national push, and it worked. The middle years got no equivalent — and there is no spare teaching time to give them.

What is missing there is not more instruction. It is the practice that consolidates what has already been taught, and the information to aim the next lesson with.

Which is the case that follows.

WHERE THINGS STAND — SOURCES

• ASER 2024 (Annual Status of Education Report), ASER Centre — rural India, one-on-one oral assessment of children aged 5–16 in 19 languages, methodology unchanged since 2006.
• Enrolment and out-of-school figures, ages 6–14 and 15–16, ASER 2024.
• NIPUN Bharat Mission and Foundational Literacy and Numeracy directives under NEP 2020 — 83% of schools reporting directives, 78% reporting a trained teacher.

WHY PRACTICE

NCF-SE 2023 treats practice as the mechanism by which capacities form — “knowing how” rather than knowing that. Organised, regular and steady practice, it holds, yields a steady and positive impact on learning.

Not rote repetition. Deliberate practice, distinct from it, is what lets a student reach complex knowledge automatically. Mastery of a skill frees the mind for a higher order of thinking.

WHY PRACTICE

Cognitive science puts it more sharply. Conditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention; conditions that slow the rate of apparent learning often optimise it. Retrieval practice is one of the five such “desirable difficulties”.

What is easily recalled today may be gone tomorrow. Soderstrom & Bjork

WHY PRACTICE

Nor does practice wait on motivation. A landmark longitudinal study found that achievement consistently predicted subsequent motivation, but not the reverse.

Success is what produces the will to continue — which makes regular, achievable practice the entry point to engagement, not its reward. Garon-Carrier et al., 2016

WHY PRACTICE

And it is the working-alone time that moves outcomes. Students who study regularly after school perform 0.37 levels higher in reading and 0.23 higher in mathematics than those who never do — while direct parental help, checking notebooks and the like, shows only a weak effect. Middha, UCL, 2022

WHY PRACTICE

You've finished a class. You want to know what landed and what didn't — two questions for each student, every day. Imagine:

Ten students: twenty to set, twenty to mark. Forty students: eighty and eighty. Every teaching day.

At a pupil–teacher ratio of 30:1 across some 200 working days, that is over 6,000 pieces of work in a year. Per subject. Per teacher.

This isn't time management. It's arithmetic.

WHY PRACTICE — SOURCES

• National Curriculum Framework for School Education, NCERT, 2023 — practice as the route to capacities, deliberate practice, mastery.
• Soderstrom, N. & Bjork, R. Learning versus performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
• Bjork, R. & Bjork, E. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. JARMAC.
• Garon-Carrier, G. et al. (2016). Intrinsic motivation and achievement. Child Development.
• Middha, M. (2022). The nature of parental involvement and its impact on learning outcomes in Sitapur district, India. UCL.
• NCF curricular time allocation — ~135 teaching hours a year.

WHY DATA

A unit test tells you what happened. It arrives after the chapter has closed, when the teaching it should have shaped is already behind you.

Information is only formative if it reaches the teacher while the lesson is still live. Later than that, it is a record rather than a decision.

WHY DATA

Nor can it be read off the room. Coe calls visible activity and engagement poor proxies for learning.

Performance is a short-term change in behaviour; learning is a change in long-term memory. Performance is easily observed. Learning has to be inferred, over time. Coe et al., 2014

WHY DATA

The gap this leaves is measurable.

Teachers correctly identified the reading level of about 55% of their students. Four in ten did worse than a coin toss. Wadmare et al., 2022 — 1,823 teachers, 16,360 children, 848 schools

Of the students they believed could read a simple story, more than 70% could not read even words.

WHY DATA

This is not a handful of teachers, nor a handful of schools. The misjudgement is spread evenly right across the sample.

Nor is it explained by qualification, experience or salary — none of those predicted accuracy at all. What did was workload. Every additional grade a teacher taught made an accurate reading of their students 1.3 percentage points less likely.

The load is the variable, not the teacher.

WHY DATA

NEP 2020 asks for exactly this shift, from end-of-term judgment to continuous formative assessment. It has been asked for before.

CCE arrived with the RTE Act in 2009 and was abandoned in many states — defeated by administrative burden, large classes and an overloaded curriculum. The obstacles were never pedagogical.

You put the work in every day.
Wouldn't you want to know how it went?

WHY DATA — SOURCES

• Coe, R., Aloisi, C., Higgins, S. & Major, L. (2014). What Makes Great Teaching? Sutton Trust — “poor proxies for learning”.
• Wadmare, P., Nanda, M., Sabates, R., Sunder, N. & Wadhwa, W. (2022). Understanding the accuracy of teachers' perceptions about low achieving learners in primary schools in rural India. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 3, 100198. Sitapur district, Uttar Pradesh; baseline survey 2018–19. Reading only — the study collected no equivalent data on teachers' perceptions of numeracy.
• National Education Policy 2020 — the shift from end-of-term judgment to continuous formative assessment.
• Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 — Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation, its implementation and discontinuation.

WHY TECH

So practice has to recur, and what it reveals has to come back while the teaching is still live. Neither is affordable by hand.

That leaves automation. The question is what kind.

WHY TECH

The devices are already in the house.

85% of households own at least one smartphone. 72% of children have access to one. Bharat Survey for EdTech, 2023

WHY TECH

But two-thirds of that access is shared, usually a parent's phone, and only 6% of children have a device of their own. Around half have intermittent internet — almost always because the recharge ran out.

Which rules out a great deal: no app to install, no video to stream, no login to remember. Minutes, not hours.

WHY TECH

WhatsApp is already the second most used learning tool in these households, at 62%, behind YouTube. The genuinely low-tech alternatives are barely used at all — text messages 8%, television 7%, IVRS 7%.

The channel is already in their hands, and they already know how to work it.

WHY TECH

And yet only about one child in three receives teacher-directed material through any digital medium at all. The pipe exists. It isn't carrying teaching.

Education has a long record of adopting novel tools that fail on contact with the classroom. The safer move is not a new thing to learn, but the thing already being used.

Not more work.

WHY TECH — SOURCES

• Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE) Report 2023, Central Square Foundation — 6,030 households and 9,867 children across six states. Device ownership, shared and dedicated access, internet intermittency, tool usage.
• Hendrick, C. Instructional Illusions — the innovation illusion, and the implementation gap between design and classroom reality.
• Cuban, L. — the adoption-to-disillusionment cycle in educational technology.