Summarising the Challenge

 Summarise the challenge of student learning you plan to focus on in this inquiry.

Focus Question: How can I effectively build self-efficacy in my maths students to enable them to clearly share how they got their answer?

The past few years, I have put my teaching inquiry focus into reading and through my inquiry (combined last year with the Manaiakalani RPI programme) I have really found some things that work best when promoting students to feel that they are "allowed to be aloud" when sharing their thinking with others.

I'm hoping to be able to bridge that same principle into my maths class especially when working with my students who are just below year level. This year, I have a lovely group of six students working at Year 3 during term 1 and the beginning of term 2. 

The graph below shows their Mathematics PAT score from Term 1 of this year. The red line, shows the average score for a Year 4 student on this standardised test. 

As you can see, four of the six students scored at or above the average, while two scored just below the average year 4 student. However, I have noticed that when we are working in a small group, they are very happy to write down their answers but they are not as confident explaining their thinking or sharing their answer orally. 

This year, my maths class currently consists of 24 Year 4 students who are all working below year level as of the beginning of the 2024 school year. It is my intention to bring these 6 students up into a Year 4 maths group by the end of term 2. This will allow them to continue to grow in their understanding and end the year working "AT" year level before moving into Year 5 in 2025. 

2021 Inquiry Focus

 This year, I have stepping back into a year 3/4 classroom and I have decided to take another look into reading with my students. However, the focus this time around is centered primarily on working with my students in the Orange, Tourquiose and Gold groups (Reading at a Year 2/3 level). 

In speaking with another year 4 teacher at our school during the first Covid Lockdown of 2021, we realised that we both noticed our children reading across these three levels often struggled to express opinions and ideas or deepen their thinking about a text. Generally, these students have basic decoding ability but respond to conversation with one word or short answers. They also do not choose to read without prompting. This led us to believe that the students are not engaging in a meaningful way with the range of literature required to increase comprehension to working at or above their chronological age. 

We were prompted by Rebecca’s presentation during the Manaiakalani Data Staff meeting at the beginning of the year to think about how to increase students' responsibility to think critically about what they have read. This led us to wonder how changing teacher scaffolding from supporting literal engagement with the text to supporting more open provoking questions would we be able to move the responsibility for processing the text at a deep level from the teacher to the student. We also wondered if providing more texts of high interest to the students and creating choice in this process would increase movitivation to read longer novel texts. Lastly, if we were to teach our students to use Google apps to create and share their thoughts, opinions and connections to texts in meaningful ways would that increase critical engagement with texts and support students to think deeper about what they are reading and why they are reading it. 

Ultimately we decided that our Inquiry goals for 2021 are:

1. To increase students comprehension of novel texts

2. To increase motivation to read novel texts

3. to increase discussion and critical thinking across text types

Student Voice Survey

Present findings from this inquiry about your teaching. Ensure qualitative data includes rich descriptions of your teaching and quantitative data is clearly presented. (WFRC #9)

Now that we are finally back into a regular swing of learning at school, I was able to present my maths class with a survey for them to consider some key things about their learning in maths this year. I tried to keep the questions I asked them clear and simple. I also wanted to be sure that the answers collected would provide quantitative data that could easily be recollected at the end of the school year.

The questions that I asked in the survey were:

• I like maths. (Rate on a Scale from Not at All to Favourite Subject)
• What I find most difficult about maths is...
• I am confident solving problems involving:
• The one concept I need to improve in most is:
• My maths teacher encourages me to use proper mathematical vocabulary (Rate on a Scale from Not at All to Favourite Subject)
• We have been presented with and asked to use new mathematical vocabulary this year.
• I am comfortable asking my teacher for help when I need it.
• How often has Mrs. Moala asked you to reflect on how well you understood something in your learning?

Based on the survey results I was able to gain a deeper understanding about my teaching as seen by my 22 of my students.

In the graph below, students clearly believe that the most difficult part of solving mathematical problems are multiple steps (36.4%) and vocabulary was a close second (31.8%). I was happy to see that the students in my class identify the same areas of difficulty as I would for them.

I was greatly pleased to see the results of this graph, as I have been making a conscious effort to model using correct mathematical vocabulary this school year. Nearly 64% of the students surveys indicate that I encourage them to use proper mathematical vocabulary the majority of the time and another 18% indicate this happens most of the time.

This last graph shows the number of students who feel that they are asked to provide reflections on their own learning in various ways. While approximately 41% indicate that it has happened at times, I would love to see more students be more confident that they were asked to reflect on their learning and that they were able to see the benefit of it by the end of the year.

In order to ensure that I keep an active understanding of my student's progress after putting my interventions in place, I will be sure to conduct another survey at the end of the school year to see if my student's impression of maths and their understanding of mathematical vocabulary has changed as a result of the change in my teaching.