The Learning Lab for schools

The same seven facets

Meaning, character, pinyin, tone, listening, speaking and writing — the same split a learner sees about themselves, read across a class or a year group.

The decks are deliberately the same shape for learners, tutors and institutions. There is no separate institutional metric, because a different metric for administrators is how a platform ends up reporting one thing to a school and another to the student.

Reading it at cohort scale

1. Start with adoption — Learners attached, how many have practised, and how many were active in the last 30 days. A programme nobody uses has no outcomes to read.
2. Read the medians — Median mastery, and how much is still recalled three weeks or more after the last review, across the learners who have practised enough to count.
3. Look at movement per circle — Each circle against its own previous 30 days, listed alphabetically and never ranked. It needs five learners and 30 graded answers in both windows.
4. Open a circle for the reasons — The circle view says who would benefit from attention and why — stopped practising, confident but wrong, one dominant error type — with each learner’s recognising beside their producing.
5. Check whether it is evidence or ability — Open a learner and each facet names the activity that fills it. A class with no Speaking evidence has probably never been set speaking work, which is a very different finding.

Two limits you will hit

Neither is a bug and both are worth understanding before a senior leader asks.

Group figures need five learners. Medians and cohort comparisons are withheld below that, because an average plus one known score identifies the rest. A class of three shows individual rows and counts, but no statistics.

Facet access follows the learner’s plan, across three rungs: a student on a free account exposes three facets and a student on either paid plan all seven — whatever the institution is paying. Institution access buys seats and capacity; it does not buy a deeper read of an individual’s profile than that individual has.

What it never contains

No text anyone typed. The Lab is built from outcomes — right, wrong, how long, how confident — and no endpoint behind it returns free text, for a teacher, an admin or anyone else.

And the staff view is built from the learner’s own panels, so there is nothing on an institutional screen a student cannot see about themselves. That is a sentence worth being able to say to a parent.

Getting data into it

The Lab is evidence-driven, so a newly onboarded school sees very little for the first weeks. Nothing is wrong — there is simply nothing to report yet.

The fastest way to a useful picture is variety rather than volume: set work that touches reading, listening, writing and speaking in the first fortnight. A cohort that has only done reading produces one facet and six blanks.