How Teachers Are Fighting Pandemic Learning Loss

Save Time with SpotCheck Review Exercises: 

With SpotCheck, teachers gain access to the entire Derivita question library, covering concepts from sixth grade to AP Calculus. This offers teachers the opportunity to bring an entire SpotCheck assignment together in minutes without having to generate quality questions themselves. Teachers can also utilize their existing study-guide, homework assignments, or previous quiz content created within Derivita to create these SpotCheck review sessions with ease. 

Since teachers can access all of this existing content in one place and pull from it to create high-quality, real-time instruction or assessment content with little preparation. That gives them back the previous time they need for the many other teaching tasks required of them.

Eliminate the Extra Steps:

In the example, the teachers had the students line up with their hand-written graphs and reviewed each graph and had the students separate themselves into two groups depending on whether or not they answered the question correctly. With SpotCheck, instead of having the students bring up their graphs and stand in line to show their work, the students can submit their digital graph response from their personal device (mobile phone, tablet, laptop, etc.) and have Derivita do the grading.

Then all of the automatically-graded, submitted graphs can appear on the screen, with the teacher able to project them (without student names attached). The entire class and teacher can discuss and evaluate responses, address misperceptions, and develop their mathematical discourse as they discuss what they see on the screen from the comfort of their seat or desk. When ready, the teacher can stop projecting and have all of the student responses show as correct or incorrect, with student names attached - providing the teacher with formative data needed for next steps instructional decisions.

The addition of SpotCheck to the review exercise in the example above still allows for that “Yay!” or “Ohhhh” moment from the students, and that encouragement of each other as described in the article. SpotCheck just accomplishes it without the time spent in lines. 

Support Individualized Instruction:

Yoder’s article articulated that this teaching style of embedded trust-building exercises, longer periods of instruction, and dedicated time to fostering peer relationships and teacher-student relationships was what helped this middle school “bounce back from learning losses” experienced during the Pandemic. All of these strategies work together to build a more individualized instructional approach, which we have seen works well for most students.Pairing these strategies with educational technologies make accomplishing the goal of creating an individualized and inclusive learning environment more attainable. 

When teachers use SpotCheck in the classroom, and encourage discourse in their classes, the students can compare their thinking with that of their peers and make their own conclusions on where they need to improve and what concepts they fully understand. They become “stakeholders” in their own and each other's success. 

The teacher can, also, take stock and make a blend of data-driven instructional decisions based on the results from the SpotCheck and emotional instructional decisions based on the real-time response from their students. Both forms of decision making lead to that goal individualized instruction for each student and encourage progression.

Now, no one is saying SpotCheck as a tool can single-handedly solve the “ new middle school math crisis” as described in Yoder’s article. But it can be a resource to supplement the teaching strategies and daily or weekly instruction exercises that have proved to be successful in Virginia. 



Want to see how SpotCheck can impact your next school year? 

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