WPI Math
From TeacherWiki
WPI Math Content
Content on ASSISTments comes in the form of questions with on of three different types of feedback (this is an ASSISTment) that has been bundled into a problem set. Teachers can build their own ASSISTments with one of the 3 distinct types of feedback, click here for information on the types of feedback. Teachers can also select from and use content built at WPI. This page contains descriptions of the different content we have built. You will see two types of numbers as you look through the content, Problem set numbers and ASSISTment numbers. You can take any problem set number and assign it to a class of students. You can bundle any group of ASSISTment numbers together to make your own problem set to assign and share.
Contents |
Math Content
Math Problem Sets with Tutoring
Our story starts with a grant from NSF to put 8th grade MCAS question online and give feedback to students and reports to teachers. Almost all of the MCAS questions have scaffolding feedback for students.
Skill Building Sets
We recognize that computers are really good at record keeping. We also know that different students need different amounts of practice. So our story continues with a grant to build Mastery Learning (now more aptly named Skill Building). These skill building problem sets behave very differently from a normal problem set and are built accordingly.
- They have close to 100 ASSISTments in each set.
- All the ASSISTments are from one skill and normally just have hints as feedback.
- Students work on the problems until they get three correct in a row without any help (the number right in a row is settable but we usually use three).
- After doing 10 problems (another settable number) and not completing the set, students are asked to wait a day.
- To show that they are different, Skill Building Questions are RED.
- Here is a list of the skill building sets already finished:
Questions from your textbook
As our builder became more robust it became apparent that since students were doing homework every night from their textbooks we could have a LARGE impact by building homework from textbooks online. Students still need to own the textbook because the questions are just things like "page 12 # 5." Currently most of the feedback is just correctness, so students know if they are right or wrong and get to try again while teachers get feedback on homework completion rates, common wrong answers and more - all before the students even walk in the door.
- Math book homework
- Learn about the CMP Math Center and how CMP teachers can collaborate with us and each other.
Content organized by the WPI Skills
In our Math content. We have taken the Standards from many states, observed many state assessments and developed a list of 130 skills that students will master in the years from Grade 4 to grade 8. We call these the WPI Skills and they are used by ASSISTments to track students learning by skill. All the problems in the system can be tagged with one or more of these skills.
- Organized by Grade: 2009 WPI Skills by Grade
- Organized by the 5 strands: 2009 WPI Skills by Strand
- This PDF is a large graph containing all of the skill, as well as recursive prerequisite trees and pages organizing the skills by grade level and strand. For example, "Adding Whole Numbers" is a prerequisite to both "Subtracting Whole Numbers" and "Multiplying Whole Numbers". Furthermore, you need both of those to do well in "Division of Whole Numbers". See that part of the graph in the middle of the page, bottom left in blue.
Find content organized by Skill
This is a document that organizes all our work with Skill Builders
Worksheets
Many teachers have found it useful to have students to their work in a structured form like one of the following worksheets which reminds them to record the ASSISTment number they are working on. We have found that if you give ASSISTments to a student many do not now naturally want to pull out a piece of paper to show their work. We encourage teachers to make sure they begin ASSISTment class routines with reinforcing the idea that doing work with ASSISTments should be like their other math work, where they are asked to show their work on paper. Of course teachers don't have to spend much time looking at the paper, since ASSISTments has graded most of the work already.
- General Information about our math work.
