A Teacher's Guide to Student Dashboard Changes
“Can we provide each student with the right visualization, the right encouragement, and the right recommendation for what to work on next?”
This is the question our education, design and engineering teams have been grappling with over the last six months, and we’re very excited to present our solution in the biggest update ever to the Mathspace student experience. Watch the full showcase for a deep dive into the new experience, or take a look at this short video taking students through the changes:
These changes include:
- A new approach to student reporting, giving students greater visibility and ownership of their own learning
- Powerful new student recommendations targeting the prior skills needed to excel at the topic areas assigned by their teacher.
- A new approach to adaptive tasks that celebrates student effort and reduces student anxiety around performance.
New Skills View
The Skills view gives students greater visibility and ownership of their own learning by grouping related skills, and providing a clear path for the development of understanding across grade levels. The Student Skills Map is filtered by curriculum substrand which is presented to students as their ‘Learning Focus’. This allows students to view work across multiple grade levels within the single substrand, ensuring personalized practice is aligned with classwork.
Student results from their diagnostic check-ins for their selected ‘Learning Focus’ will generate the recommended practice tasks on their Dashboard.
Mathspace will ask students if they want to change their ‘Learning Focus’ when work is completed from a different substrand, in the form of:
- An assigned task
- A self-directed task
- A skills check-in
Skills View vs Textbook View
Students can access both Skills and Textbook view, and you as their teacher can guide them as to what will best support their learning.
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New Personalized Recommendations
Recommended tasks are Adaptive tasks from the Mathspace Textbook that are related to each student’s Learning Focus and keep students working in their zone of proximal development. They target prior skills necessary to excel at topic areas assigned by teachers. They are tagged with one of three categories:
- Ready to Learn: Check-ins completed by the student have determined that all the pre-requisite skills for this Mathspace sub-topic have been mastered, indicating readiness to learn this content.
- Almost mastered: Check-ins completed have indicated that the student is familiar with this content. Practising this Mathspace sub-topic will assist in progress towards mastery.
- Recent Work: a task that has been worked on by the student, but not yet mastered within the Mathspace textbook.
A New Approach to Adaptive Tasks
The Adaptive practice will have a new progress criterion.
Instead of focusing on a performance target (mastery) for a stopping criteria, adaptive tasks will now end based on an effort criteria (stars).
The star target is based on the depth of questions in a subtopic and students will earn stars even if they use hints and make mistakes to encourage practice in a safe space prioritizing learning over performance.
Students will not earn a star if they use ‘skip step’ in order to encourage perseverance and ensure they have put effort towards understanding the concepts.
Mastery progress will still be reported to students to encourage them to attend to precision and performance but is no longer the stopping criteria which ensures students are able to end a task after sufficient practice.
Importantly, teachers can now reassign adaptive tasks if they would like students to have further practice to work towards higher levels of mastery.
As always we are looking forward to hearing feedback from our community about these changes.