METS School Grant, 2009

Funded to Community R-VI for the 2008-2009 School Year

 

Introduction - Evidence of Need or Opportunity - eMints, Mathematics Curriculum and Capacity to Server as Model eMINT-METS School - Prior Planning and Local Commitment - Goals and Objectives - Activities - Budget Explanation - Budget

 

Project Summary

110 students at Community R-VI High School are achieving at higher levels in geometry by completing inquiry based projects as they participate in cross-curricular, technology rich activities that are implemented within this eMINTS/eMINTS4All project.

Introduction

We have chosen to submit an eMINTS/eMINTS4All proposal, the high school math room will be the comprehensive eMINTS room with language arts, social studies, science, vocational agriculture, and special education being the eMINTS4ALL classrooms.

This proposal is targeting students enrolled in geometry classes during the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years.  A pretest given during the first weeks of school will measure:

 

During the school year cross-curricular activities will address those three skills.   These activities will follow the eMints instructional model of research-based strategies with teachers integrating technology and creating a learning environment where teachers and students explore and create knowledge together.  We know that we will see our students’ skills improve at an increasing rate as our teachers participate in the intensive training grounded in the constructivist theory that is provided by the eMINTS organization.  We anticipate that by the end of year two we will have developed a valuable tool to be shared with other schools.  This will be in the form of a manual containing teacher implemented lessons complete with student activities, formative events/assessments, and annotations of success or improvements for the lesson.  This manual will be made available upon request to other schools and at the State Technology and Interface Conferences.

As an example let’s follow the proposal’s activities when the comprehensive eMINTS teacher, the geometry teacher, is teaching truth tables.  She will in her weekly Thursday email (sent to participating teachers, technology coordinator, media specialist, and high school principal) explain what the students will be doing during the next week in the unit on truth tables.  She will copy and place handouts and activities that she has located in her research on the topic in a specially marked mailbox (METS mailbox) in the teacher’s workroom.

EMINTS4All teachers will know from the email what is being taught in geometry classes.  They will choose appropriate, timely activities from their resources or from those provided by the geometry teacher in the METS mailbox.  They will then email the geometry teacher, media specialist, principal, and technology coordinator their plans for the activities during the next week.  The following activities might occur:

Vocational Agriculture

Using models of parallel and series circuits, students will construct truth tables of when the light in on based on the positioning of switches within the circuit.

Language Arts

Using a excerpt from Alice in Wonderland, the teacher will introduce the converse, inverse and contraposition.  The students will then examine truth tables of each to discover the relationship among a statement and its converse, inverse, and contraposition.

Media Specialist

Students will perform searches using Boolean (and, or, not) terms.  They will then construct truth tables for their searches.

During the week the high school principal will informally observe the classroom where activities are occurring.  The teacher will develop a formative event/assessment to include in the unit or semester exam to measure the student’s mastery.  Documents of the activity (handouts, examples, and formative event or assessment question) will be prepared and given to the high school principal to be included on the METS website and to be published in the grant handbook for distribution to other schools.  The geometry teacher will likewise develop formative events/assessments for each unit of instruction and submit documents of activities.

Not every eMINTS4All  teacher will be doing a geometry related activity every week but every teacher will do at least one each quarter.  These will be documented by the high school principal.  It is important that the technology coordinator and media specialist be within the communication link so that the laptop cart will be in needed locations and research materials will be prepared in advance.

These formative events/assessments will be used for the measurement of Objectives 2 of Goal 2.  We are using formative events/assessments because it is virtually impossible to do common assessments as we have only one teacher of each subject area and one section of many classes, thus no way to make comparisons.

Documents prepared by the teachers will be submitted to the high school principal and evaluated using a standard rubric.  These completed rubrics will be used to measure Objective 1 of Goal 2.

Teacher and Student  Population
Teacher  Curriculum Focus Area      # of  
Students      		 eMINTS  Program
Rebecca McCurdy Mathematics   40 Comp. EMINTS
Betty Fennewald Language Arts  75 eMINTS4All
Melanie Utterback Science 40 eMINTS4All
Sonja Sommer Special Education  18  eMINTS4All
Don Hanson  Vocational Agriculture 55 eMINTS4All
Chris Willingham Social Studies 80 eMINTS4All

The number of students indicated will be the total served by that teacher within this project, the largest class size will be no more than 24.  As teachers prepared their integrated activity we found that almost all high school students would be served by this grant.  The language arts and vocational agriculture teachers were doing activities specifically with freshmen and senior classes.  The science teacher would be doing hers in the sophomore biology classrooms.  Social studies would be done within the junior class level.  The media specialist will be providing instruction (Online Research Tools and Validity of Internet Research) to every class within the school during the first month of school.

Community R-VI is a rural district of 175 square miles of farm land and four small communities (Laddonia, Martinsburg, Benton City, and Rush Hill).  The district is located primarily in Audrain County with the school being located at the junctions of HWYs 54 and 19, twelve miles east of Mexico, MO.  The community is proud of a new ethanol plant in Laddonia and the home office of the Martinsburg Bank located in Martinsburg.  Several patrons are farmers, but as farm size increases we have seen the number of families engaged in farming decrease.  The MCDC Demographic profile of census data shows that the percent of persons living on farms within the district has decreased from 22.4% in 1990 to 18.3% in 2000.

The DESE profile for the district shows that 95% of all classes are being taught by highly qualified teachers and the teacher/student ratio is 1 to 14 compared to 1 to 18 for the state.  Our staff are experienced with 15.5 years compared to 12.6 for the state.

Most of the patrons travel out of the district for employment in surrounding towns.  46% of the high school students are eligible for free and reduced lunches.  KIDS Count data indicates that the average wage earner in the district makes $26,868 compared to the state average of $36,448.

Where Our Graduates Go (DESE Profile)

Missouri compared to Community R-VI

2005

2006

2007

Entering 4 yr. College/University

38.2/37.9

39.3/25.0

39.5/43.8

Entering 2 yr. College

26.5/13.8

25.8/28.6

25.7/6.3

Entering Postsecondary (Technical Institute)

4.4/6.9

4.3/3.6

4.0/0.0

A point of concern illustrated in the above chart is the number of graduates attending 2 yr. colleges and technical institutes, particularly since students are within driving distances of the Advanced Technical College (a two-year program) located in Mexico, MO.  To address this the school is in the process of implementing the A+ Program, which we feel will increase the numbers of students attending ATC.  We are in the second year of preparing for A+ with this year’s seventh graders to be the first class to benefit from the program.

-Back to TOP-

Evidence of Need or Opportunity

We have identified three needs that will be addressed in this proposal.

Student Performance

The current CSIP states:  Goals/Objective 1: 75% of the Community R-VI students will score in the Basic and Advanced Levels on the MAP Test.

The following chart shows the percentage of students scoring in the upper two quintiles of the Stanford 9 test (these two quintiles correlate closely to the upper two levels of the MAP test)

We have little change in our school population, so we have added color to indicate the same group of students in different testing years. 

Stanford 9 National Quintile Summary

% of students in the upper two quintiles (61-99)

 

2003

2004

2005

2006

7th Grade

 

 

 

 

 

Total Math

 

20%

22%

34%

30%

Problem Solving

 

27%

22%

73%

50%

Procedures

 

12%

15%

26%

12%

8th Grade

 

 

 

 

 

Total Math

 

50%

27%

46%

19%

Problem Solving

 

55%

24%

44%

29%

Procedures

 

55%

23%

48%

6%

9th Grade

 

 

 

 

 

Total Math

 

11%

59%

54%

58%

Problem Solving

 

30%

62%

52%

59%

Procedures

 

33%

65%

57%

73%

10th Grade

 

 

 

 

 

Total Math

 

67%

50%

55%

52%

11th Grade

 

 

 

65%

 

Total Math

 

48%

62%

40%

68%

12th Grade

 

 

 

 

 

Total Math

 

45%

50%

53%

37%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Class of 2008 -- This year's Seniors.

 

 

Class of 2009 -- This year's Juniors.

 

 

Class of 2010 -- This year's Sophomores.

 

We have graphed the same data, you can clearly see that at no time do we have 75% of students scoring in the upper two quintiles.

 

MAP test results further support the need for the improvement of mathematics performance.

 

MAP Mathematics Achievement Level 4 Report

Percentage of students scoring in upper two levels

 

2006

2007

 

Basic

Proficent

Total of Upper 2 Levels

Basic

Proficent

Total of Upper 2 Levels

8th Grade

39.3%

32.1%

71.4%

46.4%

25.0%

71.4%

10th Grade

20.0%

33.3%

53.3%

27.3%

30.3%

57.6%

 

A point of interest within this chart is the level of performance actually decreased between grades 8 and 10.  This proposal will directly address the needs of students in 9-12, thus addressing this decrease in performance.

 

Finally, we looked specifically at the performance within the CS-3 GLE, Geometric and Spatial Sense.  We are directly addressing this need with this grant.  The school feels that our average percentage should be close to 70% to be acceptable.  At no point are we close to the desired percentage.

 

MAP Performance on Show-Me Standards - Mathematics

CS-3 Geometric and Spatial Sense

Average Percentage of Raw-Score Points Earned by Each Student

 

 

2005

2006

2007

 

 

8th Grade

53%

51%

50%

 

 

10th Grade

38%

54%

49%

 

 

Attendance figures

 

2005

2006

2007

Missouri

94.0

94.0

94.0

Community R-VI

93.0

93.3

94.3

Our attendance is near or slightly below that of the state during previous years.  However, attendance rates have dropped this year, January is below 90%.  When students with low attendance were surveyed they stated that there wasn’t anything going on in classes that day, so they choose to stay home.  We know that the activities of this grant when fully implemented will make the classroom much more interesting and students will need to be in attendance to do well on the performance events and the technology projects that are going to be done throughout the curriculum.

Need to raise student awareness of how math (geometry) is used outside the classroom

Students in the two geometry classes were surveyed.  When asked if they had used anything learned in geometry this outside of the classroom,  75% responded that they had not.  This grant will reverse this statistic, by the end of next school year every geometry will have used geometric concepts in at least one of the other classrooms.

Responses to the question – Can you think of anyway that you would use geometry in your future? – were a surprise 75% responded that yes they felt that they would.  We asked them to name careers that would use geometry.  They named carpenters, architects, designers, machinists, construction workers, scientists, teachers, mathematicians, and engineers.  The math teacher has extensive experience in jobs other than teaching and she has done a great job of relating to students the need to know geometry, thus resulting in the 75% statistic.  We feel that the addition of hands-on and technology simulations will increase this percentage significantly.

 

We asked students the benefit that they would have with computers in the geometry classroom.  Responses included:

Students were asked if they felt a classroom SmartBoard would help them understand geometry.  Responses included:

Our students have been in classrooms with SmartBoards since they were in the third grade and they realize the benefits of the board.

Need to increase availability of technology within the classroom

Currently the school has 14 computers in the media center (this area is shared with the middle school), 15 in the high school computer lab (which is used for classes 3 hours of the day), 8 in the agriculture classroom (6 classes are taught in this room)  Teachers were surveyed to determine if they felt the current access was sufficient.

Responses:

All teachers felt that they wasted too much time when they take their class to the labs or media center, they estimate that 10 – 20 minutes of the 55 minute period is used to relocate the class, get the students oriented, and then return to the classroom.  Another teacher indicated that their class size was too large and there were not enough computers to accommodate their class.

Teachers were asked how they would use computers within their classroom if they were available.   Responses included