Personal Practice is a section available to students to generate personalised additional tasks on demand. This is optional and doesn't affect
What is Personal Practice
Introduction
Introduction
Personal Practice is a section available to students to create small, personalised tasks for them to do some optional, additional practise outside of their set homework.
Personal Practice tasks are 10 questions long, and using the homework algorithm, creates the task using the following rules:
Topics seen in homework, but specific skills they may not have covered yet
Questions they have previously struggled on in homework
Revisiting older topics seen earlier in the academic year
As soon as students have been set their first homework on Sparx Maths, they will be able to create these tasks whenever they like.
There is also a variety of reporting available for teachers to see how students are interacting with these tasks, highlighted below in this article.
How do students access Personal Practice
How do students access Personal Practice
Students can access Personal Practice at any time by selecting it from the main menu when logged into Sparx Maths.
Students can click on Start new to create a new 10 question task, or alternatively, they will see historic tasks underneath and their progress. The arrow allows them to go back into this task to continue working on it.
The activity history view inside the student app will also show Personal Practice tasks.
How teachers can monitor student's usage of Personal Practice
Via the Hand-in page
Via the Hand-in page
The Hand-in page shows a column, which will contain the number of questions answered correctly in Personal Practice tasks between the hand out and hand in dates.
Clicking on this number will take you to the student profile, and filter the activity view to just Personal Practice tasks, where you can then see their activity on each of the tasks and the answer history.
Note: Each task contains 10 questions
Via a student profile
Via a student profile
Going to the students profile, you'll see an activity feed at the bottom of the summary tab (you can also get here by clicking on the number on the hand in page).
This feed shows each Personal Practice task the student has created, including correct questions and with a link to view their answer history.
Coming soon: Via the XP Report page
Coming soon: Via the XP Report page
By September '26, you will be able to see the XP earned via Personal Practice clearly separated on the XP report page, alongside the other sources of XP, and total amount earned.
Coming soon: Via the Student Activity Report
Coming soon: Via the Student Activity Report
By September '26, you will be able to see the number of questions answered within the Student activity report for a given week.
Frequently asked questions
Are students limited to how often they can use this?
Are students limited to how often they can use this?
No. Students can continue to create personalised practice tasks, although will not be able to continue to create them continually until they complete some that have already been created.
How long do these tasks last?
How long do these tasks last?
A Personal Practice task is available for 4 months after it is created, after which we archive it to keep the students history page neat.
How difficult are these tasks
How difficult are these tasks
Tasks are generated using the same algorithm we use to generate homework. Therefore these tasks will be at a similar, personalised level.
Some students may see questions they struggled on in previous homework, in order to practise them again, but they should still be at an appropriate level.