Hegartymaths: gimmick or game changer?

This research examines the effectiveness of Hegartymaths, an online platform comprised of mathematical
instructional video tutorials and quizzes used in approximately a third of mainstream secondary schools in
England.

The study employed mixed methods from an objectivist epistemological standpoint and used quasiexperiments
to assess how schools who use Hegartymaths compare with ones that do not, as well as exploring how schools’ implementation of Hegartymaths impacts GCSE performance for the pupils that
use it.

In order to explore the impact Hegartymaths on GCSE performance, and specifically on the topics/types
of questions which are part of the GCSE, data was collected and cleaned from the Gov.uk website, which publishes KS4 data for all 5,512 schools in England, and the Hegartymaths data team, who shared a snapshot of the big data analytics for 37 United Learning schools (30,501 pupils). A teacher survey, which included 106 responses from United Learning teachers of mathematics, considered which Hegartymaths practices increase its efficacy.

The findings indicate that there are significant and positive relationships between the time spent on Hegartymaths and the performance of students in several categories, and the time spent completing quizzes was more effective than watching the video tutorials. Hegartymaths was seen to be more aligned
to questions that test for procedural knowledge, rather than conceptual knowledge, and the schools that were identified to be more successful indicate there seems to be merit in the following practices: setting more Hegartymaths tasks at a time; allowing some topics to be taught solely through Hegartymaths; directing pupils to write notes when watching the tutorials. The research design and analyses in the study harness the power of big data with learning analytics to
contribute to the literature from a methodological point of view, whereas the findings contribute to the limited existing literature on using video tutorials within a blended learning approach.