Shifting the Time of Practice: A Digital Environment for Student-Athletes and Remediation

Abstract

A student who trains and competes during school time misses mathematics lessons that are never given again. At the High School for Sports in Luxembourg, these absences are authorised, but authorisation does not return the missed lesson. Students must catch up, often when they are least available, and difficulties in doing so may have consequences for end-of-year promotion. The formal end-of-year remediation process arrives late: a summer assignment is issued in July, and the promotion decision is made in September. In 2023/24, 6.9 per cent of students in classical secondary education received a summer assignment, and 51.4 per cent of these students were not promoted after completing it (MENJE, 2025a). Autonomous study hours were introduced at the High School for Sports in 2025/26 across several subjects. Based on the school's implementation experience, the arrangement was judged not to have achieved its intended purpose and was redesigned for 2026/27. In mathematics, students in grades 7 and 8 move from four taught hours a week to three, the fourth becoming an autonomous study hour supported by the school’s newly implemented learning management system. EMERALD (Enhancing Mathematics Engagement through Responsive and Autonomous Learning Design) is a curriculum-aligned digital practice environment for secondary mathematics, built and studied by the first author and integrated into the school’s learning management system. Two studies follow. The first accompanies one cohort through the autonomous study hours for three school years. Its primary outcome is the temporal pattern of practice, tracking when students work, for how long, and how that reorganises around training and competition. The second study asks whether a digital environment can identify learning gaps early enough to support earlier remediation. This paper reports the design phase only and presents no empirical results.