by Dan Aalbers (continued from last week)
Here are my observations through twenty weeks of school.
Student effort is way up.
On the IXL program, students will work a problem and submit it. The feedback is immediate and PRIVATE. Many of my students in Algebra B have struggled with math in the past. They are not very confident in their skills and certainly donʼt want their errors discussed in front of the whole class. If a problem is missed in IXL, a thorough explanation of the problem is immediately shown. Skill sets are broken into levels and as a student gets problems correct their “SmartScore” will improve and if they miss a problem the score will drop some. In my Algebra B class, a “SmartScore” of 80 is considered mastery. Some students can master a skill in about 16 questions. I have had students do hundreds of problems on a level before reaching the goal.
Students can work at their own pace.
One of the biggest challenges in my Algebra B class is the wide variety of mathematics ability level. On a traditional book assignment or worksheet, one student will be done in five minutes another will take fifty minutes. When practicing on IXL, many of my students have thrived on being able to proceed right into the next skill set. It really gives the teacher an effective way to basically have an individualized education plan for each student in their room. If a student is done early they donʼt become anxious waiting for others to get done they move on. If students need more time they just keep working without feeling “dumb” for holding up the whole class. It has worked well.
Classroom time has been optimized.
The daily struggle of finding your assignment, checking it, going to your locker to look for it, etc. has been eliminated. Direct instruction is still done in front of the entire class and quizzes and tests are discussed as a group but the time spent on daily classroom management of correcting and discussing a problem in front of the whole class when only two people had the question has been eliminated.
As you can tell, I am excited about what is happening in our math department. I am regularly seeing students around the building and in study halls working on the website trying to get through a certain level. In this day of standardized test scores, I am anxious to see how our students who have spent a considerable amount of time on the IXL web site perform on the Iowa Assessment Test this spring.