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Here are the students’ responses before and after implementing game like activities and movement for six weeks. First, the pre-attitude survey represents how students felt about math before the project started. 11 students agreed to liking math, but also liking other subjects just the same, while 5 disagreed and 1 that did not know. The second question students were asked was, “Math is my favorite, and I like it better than any other subject.” 8 students agreed to that question while 9 disagreed. The last question asked students if they thought math was interesting. 13 students agreed, while 1 disagreed and 3 did not know. Now looking at the results from the post-attitude survey, every question had improvement. For the first question, now 12 students agree to liking math but also liking other subjects just the same. 10 students now agree to math as their favorite subject and liking it more than any other subject. And now 16 students think math interesting and only one student disagreeing. While the students were taking their post attitude survey, I heard comments such as, "I love when we move around and get to play games," "I actually like math now, math is my favorite subject!” Overall, the students' attitude towards math improved. I believe the students who disagreed with these questions or statements is because they chose not to take the strategy seriously, they chose not to pay attention to the lesson because they had something else on their mind, or because math is difficult for them. My thought to almost all my students thinking math is now interesting is because the strategies allowed students enjoy the learning process of math and helped them think and talk about math in a different way. Almost always, I had students explain how they got an answer so all students could hear a different perspective of explanation. The students who did take it seriously and agreed with the questions were engaged in the lesson and enjoyed moving around because I noticed students excited when they answered a question correctly, and I also observed the students retaining the information.
Attitude Surveys
This graph shows the daily average engagement percentage throughout the six weeks. After each lesson, I reflected and recorded in my anecdotal notes how successful the lesson went. On the next slide, you will get to see an example. Everyday I either gave the class a 5, 3, or 0 to reflect their time on task during the lesson. A 5 meant 100% engagement with everyone engaged and on task, a 3 meant 50% engagement with only about half of the students engaged, and a 0 meant 0% engagement where no on was engaged or participating. After the project concluded, I took the scores for each week and averaged the numbers together to get an overall percentage for the week. As represented in the graph, three weeks were at 100% engagement, which meant everyday for that week, the class scored a 5. The lowest percentage of engagement was 25%. I looked back at week 5 and due to snow days and a professional learning day for teachers the students were only in school for a total of 3 days for that week. I went back and also looked at week 2 to see why they scored a 60%. According to my anecdotal notes, some students were not taking math seriously that day and talking about what their plans for the weekend were, or messing around with their whiteboards/markers instead of participating in the strategy or game. Going further, I would make sure students knew the expectation and purpose for each strategy before collecting data.
Total Daily Average Engagement Percentage
Student Interviews
Student One
Student Two
Here are two students’ thoughts and opinions about how they felt about math when there were movement and game-like activities present. I chose to interview Student Two because he is a student who is very smart when it comes to math, but he doesn’t necessarily enjoy the process of learning a new concept. He would rather just get the homework assignment and get it over with. I wanted to also capture his true feelings about how he felt when movement and game-like activities were present. That is why I was not surprised when he brought up worksheets quite a few times during his interview. “Without worksheets, I understand it more,” he said, and “Worksheets take too long.” I totally understand where he is coming from, and I am glad he was able to experience a new way to learn math and enjoy the process along the way. I chose to interview Student One because she is a student who takes school very seriously and does not like to move on until she understands the content. I was curious to find out her opinions about movement and game-like activities and wanted to capture her thoughts. I loved listening to what they had to say. Student One found it to be encouraging, helpful and thought it helped her understand math in a different way.
All in all, by implementing movement and game-like activities into whole group math instruction, students' attitude, motivation, and engagement improved, which is shown by the triangulation of my three data sources. Students gained many beneficial aspects during this experiment. They were able to explain their thinking to their peers, actively participated and at times stayed completely on task and engaged in the lesson. By the end, over half of the class thought more positively about math and enjoyed learning new topics.
Above are the results of test scores performed by the class before and after implementing engagement strategies. The blue line represents the topic tests that were taught and the class average percentage for each topic. The orange line represents the topic tests that were taught and the class average percentage for each topic. Unfortunately, as shown by the graph, implementing engagement strategies did not overall improve student achievement. In addition, throughout my study, I felt students were more invested in engagement and time on task, which might have caused the fluctuation in test scores. Also, the amount of new content fourth graders were exposed to was high. Before implementing engagement strategies, the topics focused more on review and content that was taught in third grade. The topics students were shown while engagement strategies were implemented was new content that fourth graders have not seen before, so that could also be a reason test scores were increasing and decreasing. In the future, I would make sure students were getting just as much if not more instruction time as collaboration time. I want to make sure students are retaining the information given, thus having more instruction time is necessary.
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