Math Fact Fluency & Number Sense
I chose to interview all 19 of my students to gain a more in depth perspective on what specific strategies these students used to solve these problems. The students have solved single digit and two digit problems throughout the year and have learned many useful strategies to solve them. While all strategies are useful, there are specific strategies that are best for certain problems. Ideally, I wanted to see a shift from relying on pictures, manipulatives, and fingers, to using mental math and place value strategies.
Before implementing my action plan in the classroom, I asked each student to share the strategy that he or she used to solve each type of problem on the AimsWeb Math Computation Assessment. My hope for gathering this qualitative data was to understand each student's process and to teach him or her the best strategies to use to solve each type of problem.
As shown in the graph, many students had a useful strategy, including fingers, counting on/back, and mental math, to help them solve single digit addition and subtraction.
Several students tried those same strategies for two digit addition and subtraction, others tried using place value to solve, and others had no strategy or could not solve the problem. While these strategies can be accurate at times, there are more effective strategies to use and my hope is that the students will learn and use those strategies by the end of the year.
This graph shows the student scores on the Math Computation Math Assessment at the beginning and end of the year. The beginning of the year scores are shown in purple, while end of the year scores are shown in green.
This is a district assessment, which requires teachers to administer the assessment 3 times a year. However, our grade level team focused on the growth aspect for this assessment, so we progress monitored each student.
This data shows that all 19 students made drastic growth from the beginning of the year to the end. 17 out of 19 students have met the end of the year goal, but all students made growth.
The 3 students that had already met the end of the year goal also showed growth by the end of the year.
The strategies used in this action research plan were extremely effective because not only did students grow in their math computation scores, they can all explain why and how to solve each type of problem.
Math Computation Assessment Scores
Strategies used at end of the year
At the end of the nine weeks, I interviewed all 19 students and asked them what strategy they had used to solve each problem. I used the same questions as I had at the beginning of the action research and received fascinatingly different responses.
Single Digit Strategies
This graph shows that students made a change from using their fingers to solve single digit addition and subtraction, to using mental math and counting on. 18 out of 19 students can add or subtract single digit problems without using their fingers. This means that students are becoming more fluent with their math facts and that the strategies I have implemented have improved their fluency.
Double Digit Strategies
This graph also shows that 17 out of 19 students applied the place value strategies taught in the classroom to solve each problem. These 17 students added the ones place column first, followed by the tens place column. Throughout the last 9 weeks, students have focused on the importance of place value, how to solve two digit problems, and why it makes sense. To see that almost all of my class has used the strategy with success means that the skill groups and math stations have been effective.
To help increase math fact fluency in my classroom, I implemented the program Xtra Math. I gathered class averages from three data points that are represented on the graph. In 9 weeks, students practiced their math facts using Xtra Math 11 times.
The data in this graph shows that at the beginning of the year, my students could solve 39% of single digit addition problems correctly in 3 seconds.
At the end of the year, students could solve 61% of single digit addition problems correctly in 3 seconds. Although all students did not meet 100% fluency in addition facts (based on the 3 second response time), this is a 22% growth in this category.
The growth that I mentioned in the previous paragraph is wonderful, but the most impressive piece of data is that my class can now solve 93% of single digit addition facts in 10 seconds or less. While I feel that Xtra Math was an added benefit to accomplishing this success, I truly think the combination of Xtra Math, skill groups, and math stations made these students accurate and fluent in solving single digit addition problems.