New Ed Tech Helps Bronx Teacher Increase Her Impact on Students
Bronx, NY- Julissa Soriano, a teacher of ninth grade Algebra at the Frederick Douglas Academy III charter school in the Bronx, believes strongly in error analysis as a means to helping students improve their understanding of math. Error analysis is the use of errors to understand what a student needs to work on, also called a student’s knowledge gaps. Error analysis is often used in teaching mathematics, where a student’s grasp of key concepts and skills can be readily identified as weak or strong by having students provide answers to a series of problems that require those concepts and skills.
One-on-one attention is crucial to student improvement. Ms. Soriano’s error analysis approach replicates one-on-one attention. By identifying the exact concepts and skills each student needs to study and then assigning topics based on those concepts and skills, she has attempted to maximize her impact on her students. Though she can’t reduce class sizes, this is one way she can try to improve the learning experience for all of her students.
In the past, Ms. Soriano has done all of the error analysis for her classes on her own. She would distribute assessments, collect and analyze the data, and then address student knowledge gaps based on what she found.
“I could ask myself, ‘Based on this mistake, what is this student’s knowledge gap?’” she said in a recent interview, detailing her old approach to using error analysis. Her method was straightforward and effective, but also time consuming for a full-time teacher with a heavy course load, and hundreds of students with errors to analyze.
A solution arrived in the form of a new online math program called LearnBop. While using the program students are able to ask for hints. Each hint addresses a specific concept or skill needed to answer the problem. The program records individual student performance and overall class performance using the problems and hints, producing in-depth diagnostic reports that can be used immediately by teachers for error analysis.
Ms. Soriano said she’d tried other programs that did similar things, “but none of the other programs were as useful as LearnBop. All of the side work was done for me.”
Since Julissa didn’t have to spend time collecting and organizing error analysis data, she was freed to turn all of her attention to her students and their needs. She says she now uses LearnBop’s color coordination for student knowledge gaps to group students into similar knowledge groups, so they can work on the topics of most importance to them. The wide implementation of such programs in public schools could represent a real step toward closing the achievement gap.
Since Julissa didn’t have to spend time collecting and organizing error analysis data, she was freed to turn all of her attention to her students and their needs. She says she now uses LearnBop’s color coordination for student knowledge gaps to group students into similar knowledge groups, so they can work on the topics of most importance to them. The wide implementation of such programs in public schools could represent a real step toward closing the achievement gap.
LearnBop is currently offering a free, month-long pilot to teachers this Fall. Click here to learn more: http://go.learnbop.net/schools
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