When they came to class on Friday, they were relieved to find that they were simply testing out and evaluating 4 math practice websites for me. We've been using IXL and BuzzMath through the year, but after attending NCTM in Boston last month and hearing a lot about TenMarks and LearnBop, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted my students to help me decide which sites to use next year.
I set up userids and passwords for all of them and created similar assignments in each application. I asked my students to work on each site for 10 minutes (I set a timer). I wanted them to purposely make mistakes so they could try out the built-in feedback/hints/videos that each application provided to assist the students and scaffold them to the correct solution. A few of my students just don't like to be wrong -- I saw them actually writing out the problems, showing their work, using the calculator -- really trying to get the questions right. I explained again that I want them to just guess, just pick any answer. I didn't realize how difficult this would be for some of them!
After they had tested out the 2 new sites, I had them complete a survey to let me know the site they liked best and least. I gave them a text box to leave any additional comments as well.
Here are the results for the site they liked best:
| BuzzMath | 62.5% | |
| IXL | 12.5% | |
| TenMarks | 0% | |
| LearnBop | 25% |
| BuzzMath | 0% | |
| IXL | 25% | |
| TenMarks | 37.5% | |
| LearnBop | 37.5% |
Here are some of the comments my students made:
- TenMarks is the most "PARCC-like"
- TenMarks should teach you what you got wrong and help you if your struggling like LearnBop
- IXL is basically a online test
- In TenMarks, the hints are too general
- LearnBop is the complete opposite of TenMarks because it some how figures out your learning patterns and helps out
- I think they both did an excellent job. The videos did help a lot if I needed help with anything and I like how it showed me tips on how to do things
- TenMarks is not as great IXL because IXL and BuzzMath give details when you get something wrong
This year I used the basic (free) subscription for BuzzMath, but I think I'm going to upgrade to the Premium subscription for next year so my students can see the detailed solutions if they get a problem wrong. That's the one thing they said they would like to see changed with BuzzMath. I also think they'll like the ability to have problems read aloud and the gaming aspect of unlocking "missions". And I'll appreciate the detailed reporting tools. What I like about even the basic version is that it scaffold the students through solving the problem and gives them immediate feedback, allowing them to retry a similar problem until they master it. It also has multiple styles of problems which are "PARCC-like".
I'd love to hear your feedback on these sites as well. Feel free to take the same survey that my students took:
Before I went to graduate school to study mathematics education research, I assumed these product head-to-head comparisons were common in research. It turns out this kind of thing is quite uncommon, and most of the systematic research work done in math education related to series of textbooks funded by the National Science Foundation in the 1990s. While that work was important, it's too bad there isn't more done on the tools you mention in this post. Teachers obviously wonder about these kinds of things, and it would be helpful if more researchers helped answer their questions. I like that you reported your own findings about what students liked most. It would be even better to know which tool was most effective, but that takes a lot more work and a more careful study design. Maybe someday there will be more funding to do this work, but until then teachers like you will just have to try what's out there, come up with some criteria for judging quality, and use what works best.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment Raymond! I know my little poll wasn't very scientific, but I needed to know which site my students would like best. I don't want to spend money on something they will hate using, because even if it is a fantastic learning tool, if they don't like it they won't use it. I did preview the tools myself first to see if I thought they did a good job of personalizing learning and providing feedback. I actually thought BuzzMath was best for my special education students because of the scaffolding it provided, so I was glad to see that they enjoyed using it as well.
Delete