April Rose Carter
From TeacherWiki
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Feb 6, 2010
During the rest of this year I plan to use ASSISTment to collect and interpret data to gauge retention of the material. At my school, teachers with professional status must write goals and then collect data to show that they are achieving our goals. My goal this year is to increase retention specifically with respect to proficiency with operations on integers for my lowest level freshman math class. I’ve found that ASSISTment is useful to collect the data for formative assessment. I currently use the mastery learning sets after I teach new material to give the students practice on it. Each time we go to the computer lab, I set up a few assignments with operations on integers and then several other assignments on the new material. The students must complete the operations on integers assignments first before going on to the new material. This way, I can collect the data on integers and determine how individuals are doing with retention while still having students who have mastered the integer material practice the new material.
My main focus is then with the integer problem sets. I have set up a spreadsheet with the information on how many problems the student has had to complete before he or she has mastered the problem set. Each time we work in the lab they repeat the integer assignment—even if they have mastered it previously. I will then record the new data in the spreadsheet so I can monitor individual progress. Those students who do not show progress after 3 sessions in the lab receive individual intervention from me.
I have found this the most useful routine in my classroom and I plan to continue using this technique. At this point, I still want to compare my data with retention on operations on integers with the results from the midyear exams. I have collected that data but have yet to look at it. I’m hoping that when I correlate the midyear exams with the integer data from ASSISTment that I will see that this process has had a positive influence on my students’ retention.
If the data supports that this routine works to increase retention, I plan on continuing this with new material other than operations on integers.
April 10, 2010
Ideas for involving Fellows in "teaching" the lesson
When you want to use ASSISTments in the classroom, my suggestion is to first pick classes that would work with the assistments that are already developed. I chose to use my Math Connections and Honors Geometry classes. In my MCI class, the assistments were perfect to use; they were all highly related to what we were doing in class and it was very easy to line the material up. Because the program has many 7th and 8th grade math topics and the MCI is basically an inclusion classroom, the assistments offered a fantastic number of exercises for the students. In my honors Geometry classes, however, I had no luck at all. The material that was available for geometry was too simplistic in most of the cases. For example, when I teach volume with my honors students, an exercise in which they need to determine the value of a prism is too simplistic for them. What they are doing are problems like: "A box filled with w cm^3 of sand, sitting on its largest base, has dimensions of x, y, and z. When you place the box on its smallest side, what is the height of the sand?" Throughout the entire year I didn't have difficult enough problems for my honors students so they were easily bored.
My Plans for ASSISTments in 2010-11
I'm no longer going to be a lower house teacher next year as I'll be teaching all upperclass courses, including advanced placement statistics. Because of this, I doubt that I will be using ASSISTments in my classroom much, if at all. However, a colleague and I are pushing the use of the program with our school. I will continue to advocate the program and will work to develop a professional development workshop to present to my department.
