An Academic Olympiad…

…it probably wouldn’t be the greatest show on Earth.

It’s 2am and the nation has stayed awake to see if the 16 year old from Chipping Norton can do it. Can he win the final medal to get Great Britain to the top of the medal table?

All he has to do is complete a clear round of integration function calculations in under 3 minutes 29 seconds. He’s made it this far without any time penalties for rounding errors, and is faster through stage two of the working out than his Indian competitor who currently occupies the gold medal position.

Okay, so an Academic Olympiad might not make great TV, but can the academics, and even the students in UK Schools, learn any lessons from the training regimes of the athletes? A familiar sight in gyms across the country as people push themselves to the limit to complete “one more rep”. I wonder how many GCSE students train in a similar way — “just one more past paper question”.

Joseph Clark a gold medal in Slalom Canoeing last week. He is an Olympic champion:

“The course is the same, but every time you go down, the water is that tiny bit different… You can never get in the comfort zone as it’s easy to do the same thing and go ‘I’m really good’ but then when you turn up at a competition and you’ve never seen the course that you’re going to do, it’s always something that you think ‘it could have been a bit nicer’. Some guys …get exposed but to try and knock that on the head — you try and train your weaknesses to become your strengths, and just train all different combinations, so no matter what comes in the competition you just go — ‘I can do that’.”

There are obvious parallels to the GCSE exams that 16 year olds sat in May, and whose results come out on Thursday this week. The content and skills required for a subject such as science do not change, however, each year the paper is slightly different. Past paper practice can convince you that you are “really good”. However, there’s no getting away from needing the core knowledge tailored directly to your exam board.

Olympians train a lot, but I’m left wondering if 6 hours of challenging lessons a day is equitable, not to mention the second training session of homework which begins after an afternoon break.

The idea of working on your weaknesses is also an idea that could be improved in schools. In practice, it’s often difficult to address the individual weaknesses of 30 students in a class, and intervention strategies can only do so much for those fortunate to be far enough off their target to trigger extra support.

Adaptive software packages are being introduced which work to address the weaknesses that some students have; algorithms that track progress, revisit areas that need work and also increase difficulty in areas of strength. These can be used to optimise lesson time, whilst a little-and-often approach to homework can fill gaps in knowledge. Packages such as Tassomai do this and are tailored to specific courses, mainly GCSE science. It’s very user friendly; at least much easier than building your own training facility in New Zealand, like Joe did. With schools and parents embracing adaptive education technology, maybe the UK’s students can finish high on the medal table in the inaugural academic Olympiad.