Rationale

Need

After looking at qualitative and quantitative data of my students, it was apparent that differentiated math instruction with groups would be beneficial because it would meet the needs of all learners in my classroom. In my study, I focused on the whole classroom of students because of their low percentile in Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) scores, observations in whole group math, and overall achievement during math instruction. In the beginning of the year during math, my daily lessons looked the same, and the only ideas that changed per lesson were new topics we learned for the day.

When we started math in the beginning of the year, we first would take notes whole group; students wrote the name of the topic, an “I can” statement, and then we briefly talked about if we had prior knowledge of the current topic and how it could be used in real life. As we discussed the real-world connections, I noticed that only about 2 to 4 students would raise their hands to share. Often, there was a lack of participation in the beginning of my math lessons, and I thought it could be due to them being in the same routine for math everyday, being shy because they did not know what a skill was, or that the content was too easy and some of them just wanted to hurry through a lesson to get to the class work towards the end. After realizing a lack of engagement from whole group instruction, I thought that math groups would be beneficial because I could break the students down into smaller groups and meet students where they were with the content at hand.

Towards the middle of my lessons, I usually modeled examples through think alouds, had students help me, as a class, walk through an example problem, and then I gave them example problems to work out by themselves or with one partner. Most of the time, students chose the same partners, and I typically worked with the same 3-4 students in the back with the examples. One problem I ran into was that the people working independently or with a partner finished before the teacher led group in the back. This meant that the students in the back did not work on all the example problems, or the students who were finished sat down and waited 2 to 5 extra minutes as I finished with the students in the back. This was another realization that made me think about how math groups would be beneficial as I would meet the needs of all the diverse learners in my class by allowing them to work at their own pace.

Another observation that made me think of math rotations came from basic number sense. I thought all students from low to high needed to work on basic math skills from all operations. Many students failed to see patterns when adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying. For example, many students struggled with 2-digit divided by 1-digit examples. This was a skill that should have been mastered by fourth grade. Through observation and working with all my students individually, I did not think that any of my students confidently knew their basic math facts from 0 to 12 in all four operations. Math rotations would be beneficial to students if I allotted time for basic fact practice in a rotation. I believed that practicing their basic math skills every day would increase engagement and achievement moving forward. If students knew their math facts, then they would be able to participate and try during instruction. Students would not shut down or give up when learning new content; thus, engagement would be seen in more students during instruction if they knew their math facts.

On the Fall MAP Math data, my students’ scores were all over the place in comparison to 2015 normative data scores. The MAP test is given in the fall, winter, and spring, and my district used MAP testing to measure student achievement and growth. Four students tested below the 20th percentile; four students tested at a low-average percentile between the 21st and 40th percentiles; five students tested at the average percentile between the 41st and 60th percentile; one student tested in the high-average percentile between 61st and 80th percentile; and 3 students tested high above the 80th percentile. The MAP test uses a scale called RIT to measure student achievement and growth. RIT stands for Rasch UnIT, and the RIT scores relate to the Nebraska curriculum scale in math. In my class, 47% of students were at the norm grade level average RIT score, and 53% of students were below the norm grade level average RIT score. With the scores of my students, I was able to see how students performed out of the four categories on the MAP. These categories included: number sense, algebra, geometry, and data. When it came to number sense, about 59% of students were considered average or low. In the future, students would need to know their basic facts not only in middle school or high school, but in real-life scenarios like shopping for groceries, cooking with recipes, and in many future careers. After seeing how many students were average to low with their number sense, I believed that a rotation everyday of fact practice would increase student achievement not only in the number sense category, but in the other areas too.

Another need for math rotations was also seen from observation of students solving certain equations. About 5 of my 17 students in the beginning o f the year would rely on a number chart or multiplication chart to solve multiplication, and I noticed at least 11 out of my 17 students counted on their fingers when they added 2 single-digit-numbers together. When I did division with students, there were 2 to 3 students who tried telling me that the quotient was a number bigger than the dividend too. I was able to tell that most students did not fully grasp their basic math facts from 1 to 12 in all four operations, and I knew that the inability to recall and solve basic math facts could be a serious problem going into the future as students worked with more complex math applications.