| State: Maryland | Number of Students: 1,523 |
| School Type: Charter Management Organization | Free and Reduced Lunch: N/A |
| Grade Level: K-8 | English Language Learners: N/A |
School Context
This public charter school is one of the best performing schools in the area and serves a population of racial and socioeconomic diversity. The network boasts rigorous college prep academics driven by data, but also encourages and supports its students to be well rounded by including many extracurricular programs, including summer sessions.
State of Technology
According to the math specialist, the feeder elementary school has many academic strengths, but still students are entering 5th grade at below academic level. The middle school teachers are struggling defining and filling achievement gaps.
Currently they use Eureka Math as part of their core curriculum. The school has high expectations for their teachers to work with a higher level of rigor, but at this point, teachers have to design individual lessons for those students who are missing skills. This has proven to be inefficient and ineffective.
Tech Needs & Requirements
The school would like a systematic approach to fill gaps before hitting the more difficult modules in their core curriculum. They plan to use this tool in a station rotation model where students will work with the tool for approximately 25 minutes at a time. Based on the data collected in the tool, the teachers will be more able to reteach or accelerate students when necessary and group students more accurately.
They would like the tool to be adaptable. They would like for there to be a diagnostic which generates data that allows the tool to assign lessons that focuses on certain skills. However, the tool should have a teacher override and assignability as well.
There must be a some corrective feedback for the students. Hints vary in quality among tools, so they are looking for something that either simplifies the problem or offers scaffolding. If there was a resource library where students could get extra help, that would be nice. If so, the tool should point to which video or resource a student should look at if they are struggling with a particular skill. It would be nice if the tool could pinpoint where and why a student got an answer wrong. For example, if the correct answer is “a,” but there are 3 other possible answers, and the student chooses “c,” the program knows where the error is that the student is making.
It would be best if the tool accounted for Common Core style questions so that students are prepared for the PARCC.
Teachers will use the program daily in their classrooms and use the reporting and data features to design small group lessons the following day.
The tool must have adaptive technology, ability for teacher override, corrective scaffolded feedback, be tagged to Common Core and have a quick and easy access to data (e.g., teacher dashboard). The school provides Chromebooks 1:1. The tool must provide several data point, such as student usage data (e.g., time on tool), student progress data based on Common Core Standards, where students are as groups and subgroups and filtering options for custom reports. The school is also looking for whole group progress, something embedded within tool that can tell the administrators how students are progressing toward goals data looked at year end and/or quarterly. The tool should provide Google single sign on and integrate with Illuminate.