What do Y11s know and when did they revise?
Insights from Elemental’s 2025 data for Y11
Elemental is a new music platform using examples and non-examples to improve student understanding of the musical elements. Over the last few months Elemental’s trial phase has seen the platform used by around 2,000 students in 68 schools with over 170,000 questions answered. During the summer we’ve put aside some time to look at the data and today we are releasing some findings that teachers might find useful as the new academic year looms, namely:
- What aural knowledge do Y11s have?
- What were the two conditions under which Y11s revised?
- Some wider points on what I found useful with my own Y11s.
What do Y11s know?
The following tables show the headline information from the platform by element (e.g. articulation) and by category (e.g. staccato). If you would like to see the detail on all 80 categories then do drop me an email (ed@elementalmusic.app) or click here to come along to our launch event on September 18th.
Summary table
| Element | Accuracy |
|---|---|
| Articulation | 82% |
| Texture | 73% |
| Western Classical Styles | 68% |
| Instruments | 65% |
| Rhythm | 63% |
| Harmony (general) | 62% |
| Ornaments | 60% |
| Audio Effects | 58% |
| Melody | 57% |
| Tonality | 56% |
| Metre | 51% |
| Harmony (cadences) | 51% |
Most accurately identified categories:
| Piano | 92% |
|---|---|
| Monophonic | 85% |
| VIolin | 85% |
| Glockenspiel | 85% |
| Scalic | 85% |
| Synth keyboard | 84% |
| Harp | 84% |
| Staccato | 82% |
| Legato | 80% |
Least accurately identified categories:
| 6/8 | 35% |
|---|---|
| Melody ends on the dominant | 41% |
| Trombone | 42% |
| Mostly conjunct | 43% |
| Melody ends on the supertonic | 45% |
| Modal | 45% |
| 5/4 | 46% |
| Entirely triadic | 47% |
| 3/4 | 49% |
I have a few thoughts from seeing the platform’s data, bearing in mind that this is data from an app trial and not an academic study. Feel free to have a look and draw your own conclusions.
1) Compound time is as hard a concept as I’ve always suspected. Look at that figure for 6/8! The questions are multiple choice with four options so someone with no knowledge going by chance would get 25%.
I intend to write a blog on just the problem of aural identification of 6/8.
2) I’m not sure I anticipated the celeste being identified correctly nearly twice as often as the trombone. It seems there are some ‘niche’ categories that are, once encountered, quite easy to hear. Understanding progressed most quickly in the platform for these ‘niche-ish but straightforward to hear’ categories. Others included: organ, harpsichord, glockenspiel, harp, trills and acciaccaturas.
3) I thought major and 4/4 would be answered much more accurately than turned out to be the case. I am working on finding out what the most common wrong answers were so that I can suggest why. My suspicion is that students listening for major tonality have been thrown by the modal examples that are mixolydian. More on that in due course.
4) The audio effects questions in exams are, in my experience, more about remembering what the possible effects are than being able to hear them in use. The audio effects data shows a bit about why this is probably fair enough. There was very high accuracy for recognising the presence of audio effects and very low accuracy for recognising their absence e.g. it often quite clear when reverb has been applied to a track. Being absolute certain that no reverb has been applied is, however, tricky.
What were the two conditions under which Y11s revised?
As an inveterate reviser in my hay day, I struggle to get my head around students’ attitudes to revision. The Elemental data this year, combined with knowledge of the students I was teaching, was not only a reminder that my expectations are out of kilter with reality but also the extent to which they were out of kilter. Here are the two conditions under which we saw Y11s do significant amounts of revision in the platform in May and June.
- The Y11s were in school doing a supervised revision session.
- The date was June 14th, 15th or 16th (exam on Monday June 16th).
An example that surprised me (fool that I am) was that on June 13th, a Friday with no large exams in the afternoon, very little revision was done for Monday’s exam. There was more revision done between 2200 and midnight on Sunday evening than on the whole of Friday.
There are a few exceptions to the two conditions and I’ll write a bit below about my own attempts to buck the trend. However I think it’s useful for schools to be aware quite how strong these two conditions were. In one school where their students were undertaking supervised revision each week the students answered 15 times as many questions in supervised sessions as outside of them between May 1st and June 13th.
If this data is at all representative of the difference between revision in school and out of school then I think it supports the decision of my (recently former) school, the West London Free School, to abandon study leave before the May half-term in 2024. That year the school posted a particularly great set of results under both A8 and P8 and this might suggest one of the factors that helped.
My own experience
There were two features of the Elemental data that I found particularly helpful in supporting my Y11s in the run up to the GCSE exam.
1) The data revealed to me when they were revising.
Elemental showed me that between May 2nd and May 19th my Y11s did no GCSE music revision. Now the GCSE exam was quite a way off and there were big stressful exams much closer so… I get it. This did, however, prime me to send the students and their parents an updated schedule of Elemental quizzes that would help ensure that this revision drought didn’t last up till June 16th. Along with a couple of, judiciously timed, gentle reminders there was a marked difference from this point on.
2) I was able to see what they were revising and thereby guide them towards content they’d missed. Here’s an example:
One of the features we added last term was a series of quizzes on the OCR areas of study. This included all the content the students needed to know for the ‘Rhythms of the World’ topic and there is quite often a 3-5 mark ‘what are the typical features of this style of music’ question. This quiz was Revision Quiz 10. My Y11s were, however, starting with Revision Quiz 1 and not making it to Revision Quiz 10. This year I could actually see this so I was able to email them all with a ‘well done for revising but you’ve forgotten OCR Revision Quiz 10’ message.
There’s no doubt that this helped us to our best ever set of written paper marks and an overall:
- 6+ 91%
- 7+ 71%
- 8+ 46%
- with every FSM/PPI/LAC pupil getting 6+
- with a cohort of 35 (out of the 130 in Y11)
If you'd to see if it could help your students too then Elemental is still available to trial for free up to the end of September and you can sign up here. On September 18th we will be launching the platform alongside its sisters:
- Notational, providing classwork and homework for dictation. Features unprecedented amounts of exam-format practice for GCSE and A-level.
- Theoretical, theory from novice to A-level, always presented with sound.
- Summational, end of term assessments in primary and secondary school formatted so that they can be scanned into Summational to be AI marked, with teachers receiving detailed feedback on student understanding.
- Intelligent homework. Our final feature will operate across the platforms. Teachers will be able to set homework up to assign automatically, updated weekly based on student performance.
The launch will be preceded by a keynote from Sir Nick Gibb on the importance of music in a knowledge rich education. You can register to attend here.