Setting Students Up for Success

Andrew Shin

May 9 · 3 min read

Foregoing an examination in mathematics education is very different. Replacing it with a portfolio can be especially daunting. Care must be taken as we try new things to ensure student success as well as authentic learning.

Since students have never seen a math portfolio, we must carefully design timely checkpoints and build in opportunities allowing students to adjust to feedback.

We outlined what we wanted to see from our students in a portfolio:

· Demonstration of their knowledge

· Annotation of their work to ensure understanding

· Reflection through curation of their notes and homework

We realized that these fundamentals are similar to our daily homework collaboration activity where students are asked to display one piece of annotated independent work over a two-week period. Students are also asked to reflect on others’ work and provide constructive feedback.

Students could upload either notes or their solutions to homework questions on a common Google Slide. The annotations help students reflect on the symbolic nature of mathematics.

Caption: Our expectation was that students give constructive feedback according to the hamburger model

Annotations provided formative assessment to gauge whether students were accessing the learning. There is a fear that students are using Photomath app or the video solutions to copy. However, when we read students’ annotations, we could assess the validity of their learning.

This activity satisfied both 1) the asynchronous restrictions in place by our board and 2) the collaboration and communication portion of the global competencies in place by our school. By annotating their learning and posting their work — not only was information and knowledge coming from us, but students were also teaching other students how to complete homework and take effective notes.

Friends are helping each other during this tough time as given by survey results, but it’s important for students to see work outside of their immediate friend group as well.

However, the activity induced much anxiety for a great number of students. Students suffering from math anxiety (and/or pandemic anxiety) could not participate. Some students opted to complete the activity privately and uploaded work directly to me.

About 60% were willing to fully participate in the homework collaboration. This is the result of the survey of 38/58 students asking what made them feel reluctant to participate.

Although not all of my students publicly participated, they all saw great exemplars. Because the homework collaboration had students demonstrate, annotate, and reflect– it served as a great starting point for our portfolio.

For the next unit, we decided to establish a checkpoint for our students. We will be assessing using a mini-portfolio where students would be curating two homework questions. We will give a mark, formal feedback, and allow them to use this feedback to improve. The final portfolio will allow them to include these exact same pieces with the improvements that they have added.

We released the mini-portfolio details and provided a video explaining our expectations, the marking scheme, exemplars from two separate grade 9 and 11 portfolios. There is a May 4th Easter egg at the end! =)

We hope that the homework collaboration and mini portfolio will help set students up for success as they complete their final portfolio in June.

All of this is a culmination of work from our department. I am proud of our department collaboration in creating this learning for our students. Thank you to my friends and colleagues who have given us important points to consider on twitter as well as on the google doc. If there are any further thoughts, let us know your questions and/or comments below. As this is very new to us, we are eager for ideas to help improve students’ online learning.