Ms. Y is a primary teacher who is extremely concerned about her students' mathematical futures. She recently read an article in a journal that describes recent research, which suggests that students who don't have a firm grasp of their math facts score poorly on assessments of mathematical reasoning. According to math education experts, the inability to quickly operate on numbers "in their heads" prevents students from gaining insights into complex mathematical processes.
In the past, Ms. Y has used traditional tools to teach students math facts: worksheets, flash cards, and the like. She decides that it is time to leverage the tools of the 21st century. In addition, Ms. Y is focusing on the 21st Century Skill of self-regulated learning and plans to build practices, to support this skill, into a new project. She focuses on three practices to support self-regulated learning: student goal-setting, student access to formative assessment data, and student choice.
Ms. Y's school recently provided her with a classroom set of tablets. In addition, Ms. Y knows that many of her students have Android devices in their homes, either their own or their parents. When she goes online and searches for Android apps for teaching math facts, she is amazed at the number of apps available.
Ms. Y establishes four criteria for selecting the apps that she will make available to her students. The app needs to:
Ms. Y quickly locates several apps that meet her criteria. The app that she selects as the classroom standard is "Math Workout." She also posts links to additional apps on the classroom Website, to provide the element of choice that she knows is essential to engage students.
To launch the process, Ms. Y has each student take an independent assessment. Based on the data from that assessment, each student is asked to set weekly goals for improvement and to make a simple plan for reaching that goal. At the end of each week, the students will share their goals and progress with Ms. Y so that she can intervene where progress is not being made.
Mrs. Y installs the Math Workout app on each of the classroom tablets and provides each math group in the classroom with access to those tablets. In addition, she encourages students to use personally or parentally owned devices to use the apps at home. Each student maintains private records of their progress.
In the early spring Ms. Y realizes that, for the first time in her two decades of teaching, every student is able to demonstrate mastery of their math facts. She notices as well that this mastery is reflected in higher achievement in all areas of the math curriculum. An additional yet unexpected benefit also comes in the spring. For the past two years, the local high-stakes assessment is taken on the school laptops. Mrs. Y notes that her students seem much more comfortable while taking the assessments. She vows to continue to refine the process in the future.