Nature and Extent of Student Challenge Part 1

TAI 2020 WFRC #5: Nature and Extent of the Student Challenge...

Share your findings about the nature and extent of the student challenge. Make sure it is clear what evidence from your inquiry supports each finding.

The challenge for my students this year is to make accelerated progress in Maths. 

One of the ways I planned on keeping track of students was through their maths blog. Because of Covid-19 and lockdown, this messes up our data a bit so I feel the need to first off compare students blog posts data pre and post Covid. This looked at how often students posted their maths work up onto their blogs in Term 1 (Pre Covid) and Term 2 (Distance Learning). Along with this data, we also need to take into account the number of times students actually tuned in to distance learning by turning up to our Google Meets twice a day. That is at least 1 maths meet a day = 12 Google meets for the 5 weeks of distance learning. 

Here is the data comparing Term 1 Maths Blog Posts and Term 2 Maths Blog Posts.

This made me look closer at why students hadn't put as many maths work on their blogs. Whether it was time restraints or not doing the work. What this did point out for me, was that I wasn't seeing enough of my students completed work than I should. Group work was about as far as I got in terms checking in on students learning. When you crunch the numbers, theres are 10 weeks in a term. There is at least 1 set of slides which houses students learning tasks for each week. When they are working with the teacher, they normally have a modelling book they are working in. The expectation was that they are taking a photo of this and posting it on their blogs in order to explain what their learning was about for that day.
The above data clearly shows this was not happening before and after Covid.
Student P is a regular blogger and this is shown in the stats. However, Student A, E, K and V have no blog posts related to maths for the first half of this year. I am sitting here right now asking how can that be? what have they been doing in class each day? There is no record on their blogs of the learning which took place. A big eye opener and one I will be addressing straight away.

Although this wasn't the actual challenge my students faced, this is definitely a wake up call for myself and my students and make this change straight away.
I'll have another Part 2 to this post to address the 'challenge' part of this more.