Psst…Here’s a trick to accelerate math learning

As you can see above, at Thinkster Math, we do this routinely. We provide a snapshot of a student’s progress report by topic and concept within each topic. This is a personalized report for each student. But we do not stop here. We also add a time component to this report. See below for the Dynamic Progress Matrix!

As you can see above, our Dynamic Progress Matrix is able to show auditable performance improvement over time in specific topics and concepts for every student. You can clearly see that performance improvement over time, dynamically generated, is the foundational basis for showing this report. This kind of transparency helps parents, students, and our teacher’s track how quickly and well enough our students learn math.

Do we stop here? By showing a personalized report, showing dynamic changes over time by itself, is it capable of improving learning outcomes?

Not in our opinion!

These kinds of progress reports are like the route you took on Google Maps to reach your destination. It does not show how well you drove and what specific steps you took to make an improvement in your driving performance. It does not show if you were guided in your improvement efforts.

Our tutors look at the dynamic progress report and then find out what specific areas of improvement is needed for each child. They can do this simply by clicking on one of the colored tiles within the Progress Matrix. It not only tells them which worksheets and which problems were challenging for each student, but also what specific worksheets within each topic and concept needs to be assigned to a particular student to accelerate his/her learning. We make this data available to our parents as well, as you can see below.

We live in a data driven economy. People want objective data that enables them to identify areas of strengths and weaknesses. It allows them to make decisions that are not based on conjecture or hypothesis, but based on data that provides directional insight that helps change behavior. It’s this behavior change that provides the opportunity for performance improvement.

After all, if you never got a speeding ticket for driving, even though you do drive above speed limits, then where is the opportunity to correct behavior?

Personalization is a necessary condition for successful learning outcomes. There is no contest. It is not just a sufficient enough condition for improved learning outcomes.

Just curious, what other methods have you come across that accelerates learning?