Derivita Power User Stories: The Impact of Immediate Feedback

Last week, our Marketing Director, Arianna Irwin, sat down with North Forsyth Middle School Math Teacher and Derivita Power User - Lori Thomas.

Lori was named “Teacher of The Year” in her district, Forsyth County Schools in Georgia in 2021 and teaches Algebra and Accelerated Math for eighth grade students. She is in her twenty-first year of teaching and is here to tell us all about her Derivita journey. 

Watch the full video interview here.

The Beginning:

Last year, Forsyth county schools transitioned to Canvas as their Learning Management System (LMS) and as Lori was piloting Canvas she got the opportunity to pilot with Derivita. “Derivita offers so much, it can be overwhelming…So just a little bit at a time, I just started playing around with it. I started making my little homework quizzes from Derivita. And instead of a handout homework, they [my students] just do a little online quiz and they can have multiple attempts,” Lori explains. 

The Learning Curve:

When first introducing her students to the Derivita platform and how to submit their response, Lori took the time to “train” them. She explains that with math solutions there are “a variety of ways to answer questions” and Derivita understands this by accepting various formats for the same answer. So it was important that her students got used to and could make the most of “using an equation editor where it has the square root or the exponent or the fraction” built in. She explains, “So I would allow these little homework quizzes to help train them, not just in the math, but just how to use the platform itself. And so they got really good at using the editor”. 

Lori’s Derivita Feature Highlights:

Lori has a lot of favorite Derivita features, but in throughout her Power User Story these are the features she highlighted:

Immediate Feedback For Independent Learning 

Lori states, “The feedback part of Derivita is fantastic. It's so empowering.”

Lori explains that with the practice tasks and homework assignments, “having the similar question with the feedback is super powerful…my students really appreciated that feedback. It's not like Ms. Thomas had to be hovering, explaining every little misconception”. Lori’s students were able to identify and correct their own mistakes and then “they can try again” - all on their own. 

Multiple Attempts to Ensure Mastery:

Forsyth County School District allows for retakes on assessments and Derivita allows Lori to ensure her students’ independent success on those retakes. Lori could open up the immediate feedback feature after an exam and the students could see which questions they missed and why they missed it. Lori explains that for her students, “a lot of times it's just little details, a little negative or whatever,...so they didn't misunderstand the big idea. And then once they understood and did their little corrections and were able to be like ‘oh, now I understand’. Then I would go back into Derivita and I would just copy that same test, but I would title it Retake so there were no surprises. It was a different version of the original, but no surprises. It still assessed the same skills”. 

Various Versions of The Same Assessment: 

Once her students got comfortable with Derivita, Lori began to introduce Derivita in class with assessments. With Derivita she can offer different versions of the same test, which is not only great for retakes as proven above, but another method of cheating prevention. Derivita pre-built questions come with “a variety of different versions and so everybody gets the same type of problem, the same strategy and process, but they just get a different number”, which makes building these varied assessments quick and easy. 

She states that these different versions of questions and assessments are “a game changer for math teachers because you're not having to make a lot of different tests. Derivita does it for us”.

Peer Tutoring:

Lori loves when her students work together to help each other identify and correct misconceptions or visualize another way of reaching a solution. Derivita helps her students “work together and help each other on why they missed it [a problem]...the peer tutoring is incredible”.

SpotCheck Reimagined:

Lori is a fan of using SpotCheck as a way of post-assessment review. She explains, “I use it a little differently than how Derivita developed it, but it still works great. So I love to do item analysis…you can quickly see which question was missed the most…And so we just bring that [the question] up the day after the test”. She then has her student solve the problem with a pencil and paper and discuss the process. After the discussion, as a class, they “regenerate a similar question, and…review and clear up those misconceptions”. 

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