Texas Public School District Wants to Prepare Students for High School Math

Texas Public School District Wants to Prepare Students for High School Math

This school has a blended learning initiative and is looking for a math program to help fill gaps with learners who are not successfully passing the STAAR tests, thus falling behind in high school math.

State: Texas Number of Students: 18,585
School Type: Public School District Free and Reduced Lunch: 49.5%
Grade Level: PK-12 English Language Learners:15.6%

School Context

SCHOOL CONTEXTThis growing school district has about 18,000 students. While some schools are at 95% free and reduced lunch, others are far lower. The district offers rigorous instruction with a commitment to serve the unique needs of every child. The district is committed to partnering with families in designing the best program for each child.


State of Technology

The Math Specialist for this district has determined through STAAR testing that there is a significant number of students that are not succeeding in this test and are unprepared for high school math. This has been because of a shift in mathematics standards due to a rewrite. They found gaps in content knowledge because of the shifts in content standards from one year to the next. It is hard to prepare students for a test when they do not know how the new assessments look. Additionally, the Director of Digital Learning was approached by several teachers who proposed a variety of math software programs to help this need, but unfortunately, there were too many misalignments between the tool and the school's model and standards.

The district currently uses Think Through Math (TTM). While the tool works well for remediation, when it was launched it was not implemented sustainably, so teachers do not view it as an integral part of their instructional model. Some teachers use it for homework assignments, for those who have students that have computers at home. The biggest issue is standards alignment. The Specialist believes that TTM is missing some dealbreaking standards that they need to cover to help their students.


Tech Needs & Requirements

They are looking for a tool that can be used in Summer School classes and for those targeted students that need extra help with passing the STAAR exam. There are several features they would ultimately like to see in a tool. The tool must be aligned with the readiness standards for TEKS focused on conceptual math to develop true reasoning skills. The tool should have activities that make students curious about what the next steps are,to avoid careless clicking.The tool should provide a user experience that is like a game element or an an adaptive tool. Students should be able to see where they are in progress. If there are voices, the voice needs to sound human and speak English clearly. Teachers would like to be able to see how quickly or slowly students move through the material in addition to progress monitoring. Teacher dashboard with alerts would be a nice to have. Teachers would like a override in the tool, allowing them to assign or change the path for students when they deem necessary. Feedback and Scaffolding Students should be able to try skills multiple times before determining mastery. If there was an online tutor, or resources to help students that would be great. There should be some sort of hint of simplifying mechanism to help struggling students. All content must be TEKS aligned and of those aligned all readiness standards must be included. Specifically, this school is looking for the company response to include screenshots, evidence,or access to a demo that shows these three standards: 8.8C Model and solve one variable equations with variables on both sides of the equal sign that representmathematical and real world problems using rational number coefficients and constants; 8.10C Explain the effect of translations, reflections over the x or y-axis and rotations limited to 90°, 180°, 270°, and 360° as applied to two dimensional shapes on a coordinate plane using an algebraic representation; 8.12D Calculate and compare simple interest and compound interest earnings.

Students should see where they are in scope and sequence but not be able to change their path.

For every 30 kids, 3 teachers will be assigned 10 and they will rotate through stations. This tool will be used everyday or every other day as an expectation. Nice to have: email system/dashboard/notification so that teachers can get alerts about students that are not doing well or are doing well.

The pool should be TEKS aligned, 100% aligned to the Readiness Standards of the TEKS. 8.8c, 8.10c, and 8.12d (include evidence in proposal if possible). Rostering must be easy. Upload from CSV. They like the ability to pull students from a bank into sections so as to avoid users adding duplicates.” User interface for both teachers and students must be clean, smooth, and have as few clicks as possible to get to content or access reports. Desktops, iPads, Chromebooks, therefore the tool should be device agnostic. The School will use data a lot and requires the following information: data on students score % data about missed items and time on task. At what point did the path change for the student. What was the precipitate that made the tool change the path. The more DATA the better. The tool should integrate with Canvas, Google and Active Directory.

*Content From 2016

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