Who are my Learners?

 My target group consist of 8 Year 7&8 students who's reading ages range from 8 - 9 years old. 5 girls and 3 boys.

G1 - Year 8 currently reading at 8.5 years old. She attends class regularly and looks like she pays attention. Upon group check ins, most of the time she has sat there doing nothing. Her reading is very static, and often needs to repeat after me to hear a more fluent sentence.

G2 - Year 7 currently reading at 8.5 years old. She is able to decode fluently but often does not take in what she is reading. We've had multiple tries at re-reading or scanning a text for key words we discuss in group time.

G3 - Year 7 currently reading at 8.5 years old. She comes off as quite confident in group situations. However when reading 1-1, she reverts back to doubting herself and comprehending what she has just read.

G4 - Year 8 currently reading at 8.5 years old. A second language learner to English. She has only been in our NZ schooling system for 2 years. Very confident with playground language, but struggles forming her ideas about a text. She decodes very well and can sound out unknown words confidently. 

G5 - Year 8 currently reading at 9 years old. She is able to complete set tasks but can totally miss the mark with comprehension questions at times. Literal questions are simple for her but anything to do with opinions or providing supporting evidence she tends to get confused with.

B1 - Year 8 currently reading at 8 years old. A second language learner to English, he made great shifts in 2020 from a reading age of 5.9 to 8 by the end of the year. He is currently already 13 years old turning 14 this year.

B2 - Year 7 currently reading at 9 years old. He tends to rush through a lot of things from tasks to reading. But when asked to slow down, he struggles to put into words the work he is struggling with. Vocabulary acquisition is a big thing for him. He often forgets a lot of new vocab from day to day group discussions. 

B3 - Year 8 currently reading at 9 years old. A second language learner to English, he moved made a whole years shift from 8-9 years old in 2020. He is more able this year in navigating his way independently through his learning. His reading and writing make more sense, and he normally helps out B1 with his daily tasks. 

This here is a brief summary about my target group this year. There are 2 more students in this group but for tracking purposes, I have purposely left them out due to frequent absenteeism. 

Later on this term, I hope to have a more complete profile of my learners using student voice survey, as well as academic data from beginning of year tests. 

How I will use the data

TAI 2020 WFRC #6: How I will use the data...

Explain how some of the data you have used to build a profile of the students’ learning will be used as baseline data at the end of the year.

In my data gathering process, the pieces of data which gave me greatest insight to student learning and behaviours around mathematics was the analysis of blog posts. Although it didn't give me precise levels in terms of data, it did leave a gap as to where all their learning for the term/year goes. The lack of blog posts followed up by the student survey as to why there were so few blogs about their maths learning revealed these things:

• Students did not feel the same expectation (flow, cycle of learning - Learn, Create, Share) that they felt in literacy. Therefore this resulted in maths work left sitting in their drive.
• Similar to this, students felt maths did not follow a certain routine everyday. Some days you had hands on learning with materials, some you worked independently on slides and some you were with the teacher a lot of the time doing group work on modelling paper. 

So how do I plan on using the data I've collected?

1. Analysing students PAT test scores will help target certain questions/areas in maths majority of students are getting wrong. 11 students from my target got less than 10 of the 41 questions in the PAT test. This can attended to looking at the common areas to focus teaching.

2. Student voice surveys keep me informed about the changes taking place and also how students feel about the learning and changes taking place. This is given anonymously so students feel more confident sharing their true feelings about maths.

3. Blog post analysis. This data has definitely been an eye opener for me as a teacher and will structure my maths program to allow time at the end to talk about and share their learning for the day/week. 

At the end of the year, it will be great to see if there is shift in the number of questions students are getting correct, therefore their scale scores and stanines will also increase. For our student voice surveys, what I'll be looking for is that students are becoming more aware of just what they are learning about in maths and also have an opinion/preference for the style of learning which will enable them to learn better. My hope is that this will come out in the student voice surveys carried out throughout the year. Blog posts should see a climb in the number of maths blog posts going up. From here, we can then focus on the quality of blog posts and the task description explaining their learning for the week.