Why Students Repeat Activities

Our My Reading Academy, My Math Academy, and My Reading Academy Español programs are mastery-based applications that leverage adaptive learning technology to personalize each student's learning experience. 

At the core of our school solutions lies our Personalized Mastery Learning System (PMLS), the digital learning component that provides direct support to learners throughout each of our programs. For the 2025 school year, our Personalized Mastery Learning system for MMA and MRA has been significantly improved with an AI-enhanced rebuild that makes the system faster, more accurate, and more responsive.

• Personalized Mastery Learning System: Repetition and Advancing
• Personalized Scaffolding and Feedback
• Most Common Reason that Students Report Repeating Activities

Personalized Mastery Learning System: Repetition and Advancing

In these adaptive learning environments, each student progresses at their own pace. Some students might require more time and practice on certain topics before moving on to new ones.

• Our programs may provide similar activities for a student to repeat multiple times with a different dataset to ensure they fully grasp the material.

It is also important to remember that repetition plays a vital role in the learning journey. It’s common for students to need multiple exposures to a concept or skill in order to achieve mastery.

• If students are frequently engaging in the same activity, it's likely because they are working toward a deeper understanding or fluency in that particular area.

Also note that there are levels within activities.

• A student may start on the Easy setting for an activity and pass, then move to a more challenging Medium level (so they are "repeating," but still advancing).
• On the Medium level (which looks the same as the Easy level), the student may get some questions wrong and repeat that Medium level again.
• After passing the Medium level, the student may move on to a Hard level (which is, again "repeating" but advancing within the activity).
• The student may need to do the Hard level a couple of times to demonstrate mastery of the skills. 
• If the student cancels an activity they see because it looks like they've played it before, the system is going to keep giving it to them because it needs them to demonstrate their master of the skill, a higher level of the skill, or a slightly different version of the skill. Cancelling without playing does not give the system the information it needs to move the student forward.

Personalized Scaffolding and Feedback

By consistently assessing learners and gathering data about their knowledge and progress, My Reading Academy and My Math Academy can provide personalized scaffolding structures and formative feedback tailored to each student.

This level of personalized support requires continuous practice to build foundational skills. Students might be repeating activities to enhance their skills gradually.

Most Common Reasons that Students Report Repeating Activities

• The student has repeatedly cancelled an activity without playing it, whether that's because they think it's too hard or because they think they've already played it. Encourage students to play and complete all activities presented so the system can properly move on. 
• The student answered incorrectly and therefore does not advance but gets another chance to demonstrate mastery.
   
• The student answers correctly on an Easy level of the activity and advances to a Medium and then Hard level of the same activity. This may “feel” like repeating to the student, but it is demonstrating mastery and progressing within the program.
   
• The student is playing an activity type that is designed to repeat. Some activities, notably a few memorization games based on the Leitner System, which is a spaced repetition technique for learning with flashcards, achieve their goal based on defined rules of repetition.
   
• The student has moved to another related activity that looks visually similar, so they may not realize the activity is new.
   
• The student may have inadvertently exited the game (pressing the back arrow), closed a browser tab, or had their browser or device crash. 
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    • Books in My Reading Academy and My Reading Academy Español are a particular type of learning activity that students can see repeatedly presented. Students will not get new books unless they finish previously attempted ones. The system will reassign unfinished books until they are completed. This issue can occur if the student intentionally (clicked back arrow, closed a browser tab) or inadvertently (device malfunction) exited the book before completing the activity. Even if the student was very close to the end, the system will not count the book as read if was exited before it was fully completed, which includes answering any Yes/No questions the student is asked at the end. 
      
      

Encourage Students to Complete All Activities

To get the best results from our adaptive programs, it’s important for students to complete every activity—even ones that feel too hard or ones that they think they've played before.

Sometimes, students may be given activities that are beyond their current skill level. When this happens, they might choose to cancel out of the activity rather than try it. But skipping the activity means the program doesn’t get the information it needs to adjust. Without that signal, the same kind of activity may keep showing up. 

The same is sometimes true when a student sees what looks like an activity they've already completed and so they cancel it without playing. In this case, the system is presenting another version of the activity to make sure they have mastered it or to test them at I higher level of the activity. Cancelling rather than playing will typically mean the student continues to see the activity over and over.

That’s why it’s important to encourage students to play through all assigned activities, even if they don’t know the answer or get things wrong, and even if it looks like an activity they've already played. Struggling with a skill provides a valuable signal to the system, as does confirming mastery of the activity at a higher level. The program uses this signal to adjust the difficulty and guide the student to the right level.