MIT2021 - Project Data Collection

Now that I have identified my challenge, I have started to collect some data from my Year 7/8 students to help guide my project. This data will help to identify the gaps and and the specific challenges my students have within maths. I collected the following data;

• PAT Data
• GloSS Data
• Maths Knowledge Assessment (SFOA Progressions specific)
• Student and teacher voice
• I looked into our SFOA mathematics digital progressions\

PAT Data

                                      

This data shows our Year 7/8 PAT data - students that were above or below the national average.  

                                              

Within this PAT Data, I looked specifically into the goals that aligned with maths knowledge. I identified what elements of maths knowledge our students struggled with. 

Student and Teacher Voice

From this data I had the following wonderings and reflections; 

Wonderings

• Teachers lack of understanding of the goals - not sure or wanting to 'tick' it off based off their understanding of the goal. 
• Huge discrepancies between level 3 and 4 digital progressions. 
• Variances in different knowledge data - some goals stronger than others. 
• Basic facts data - concerning, especially in relation to maths strategy. 
• A lot of our students don't like learning about  proportions and ratios - the data shows a lack of understanding around basic fraction understanding - could this contribute?

Reflections

• Maths team - I have recently joined the school maths team. We are looking into how maths is taught across the school and what needs to change/what we need to look into and research. Some of the elements of our school wide maths that we are diving into includes; the consistency of maths teaching across hubs, the digital learning progressions and possible tools we can integrate into our maths i.e. DIMIC. 
• I think my plans are realistic - I would like to do something for the year 5/6 team and year 7/8, but I'm not sure if this is realistic enough for this year. could just trial within year 7/8?

KPMG Term 1 Hui Reflection

Our MIT group met together for our second design thinking session on Monday 29 March. Our Hui was held at KPMG in Auckland. We spent the day revisiting our projects as a group since out last Hui using the following WWW questions.

• Whats working?
• Whats not - barriers/road bumps
• What opportunities do you sense?

We then referred back to our 'crazy 8s' from our last Hui and started to experiment, prototype and test our current ideas. 

Reflection

We started by reflecting on the design thinking process (refer to this link for more information on the design thinking process - User Testing: A Guide To Step 5 Of The Design Thinking Process) from last session and used the following questions to guide our reflections;

What's working?

• Great support from team members. 
• I now have a better understanding of our mathematics data. 
• Student voice - was very interesting and informative. 
• Started looking at different approaches to this challenge - how can we change what we have been doing and getting students more engaged.

What's not?

• Need to clarify in my mind what I want to create. Look into why other things haven't helped in the past.

What's next?

• Look into different tools that have already been created that I would like to base my idea off i.e. Tipu
• What do I need to learn to create this tool? 
• Feedback from our school maths team?

Current Challenge Statement

• My initial challenge statement
• "A significant number of our 2021 Year 7/8 cohort are below curriculum level expectation in Mathematics, due to gaps in their maths knowledge". 
• Initially at the start of today's session, my challenge statement had not changed. However, reflecting on today's session it will need to be modified. I will explain this in more detail later in this post. 

Gelling Process

In this 'gelling process' this helped me to challenge my current thinking and make changes based off my current data and feedback from MIT colleagues. It helped to 'flesh' out my challenge and look at the real issues within it - what do I need to overcome or learn about to make this project a success?

I found it particularly interesting listening to Sarah's project - it is very similar to my current challenge, however she is working with year 5/6's. After chatting to her and gaining some insight/perspective from Matt and Dorothy, we have decided to collaborate for our projects for the year. I think that by working together we will be able to achieve more (across a broader range of curriculum levels) and will be able to draw on each other to create something really valuable for our learners. 

Drawing it up

Once making the decision to work with Sarah, we started working on our project and talking through out ideas. We talked with Matt around some ideas we can use for our project. He showed us an interesting way we can use google sheets to create a question where the numbers change each time the page is refreshed. 

The image above shows Sarah and I's thinking for our project. It shows the areas we want to go and our identified next steps. There is still a lot to work through and decide on, however, our idea at the moment is to create a maths site for students to access and work independently on maths strategy and knowledge work. 

Prototyping

I really enjoyed drawing up a plan for our site. We have tried to keep it relatively simple and user friendly (i.e. maximum of 3 clicks) for the students. There are a range of elements we want to incorporate into our project and site, however,  we need to assess what is achievable in the time we have. Incorporating in video tutorials, a google form where people can submit their own questions, making the questions as multi-modal as possible and deciding what type of assessment to use are all aspects of our project we will need to consider. 

Progress update

After our session today we wrote down some next steps, they are as follows;

• Learn how to code the google sheets with the changing maths questions
• Sort out what specific goals/progressions we want to incorporate
• Rethink our challenge question
• Decide on a name

Next next steps;

Consider the following;

• Video tutorials
• How to make the questions multi-modal i.e. use of mote?
• Create some questions and think about formatting
• Consider how assessment will be incorporated

Sarah and I plan to meet to unpack some of these next steps together and see where our project goes.