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The Benefits of Giving One-Question Quizzes in Math

TL;DR (By ZenEdPro): The one-question quiz is an innovative assessment method that accurately measures students’ math proficiency by focusing on problem-solving rather than traditional grading. It involves carefully curated, standards-aligned problems, grouped by difficulty, and includes peer-checking and retake opportunities. This approach fosters deeper understanding, collaboration, and engagement in math, shifting the focus from grades to genuine mastery of the material.

By Nancy Ironside

How do we know when students are proficient with a math skill? While there are many measures of proficiency in mathematics, what really matters is whether or not students can solve a problem when the problem is in front of them. Our best hope as teachers is to help kids develop the curiosity, the critical thinking, the content knowledge, the stamina, and the desire to solve whatever math problem they face.

While I keep this hope in the forefront of planning and assessment, I noticed that my fifth and sixth graders were not showing these traits when it came to the quizzes I gave. For many, it was just a quiz, and if they could get enough points, they could pass and be done.

Math should be joyful and challenging, yet this cycle of assessment was neither. What if the way we measured mastery actually told us what kids know? And what if kids were a little bit excited about showing us their stuff?

A solution presented itself when I discovered this problem-solving framework. The structured format helps kids work through challenging problems in a way that scaffolds their thinking. What if I adapted this framework and gave kids one question to solve instead of a traditional quiz?

I grappled with the fairness of having just one chance to show proficiency. Traditional assessments offer multiple chances, but when there are many problems, kids can score enough points to pass without really knowing the math. One fair question, on the other hand, is a way for kids to show what they know without taking up too much class time or awarding points for the sake of points. I give one such quiz per unit, which comes to about one every three weeks.

While a one-question quiz seems like a simple assessment, research and planning are required to make it work in a way that is fair to teachers and kids.

5 Necessary Steps to Implement a One-Question Quiz

1. Curate standards-aligned, challenging, and fun problems. For obvious reasons, kids should not all solve the same problem. Rather, you’ll need a hefty bank of problems that align to the standard being assessed. You can find problems in all the usual places: Illustrative Mathematics tasks, the Achieve the Core Coherence Map, or even the curricular materials you already use.

Keep in mind that no one wants to solve a boring math problem, so the problems should also be fun. When I’m selecting problems, I tend to revise them and get a little silly with names or scenarios that relate to our school. Generally, I gather questions daily as I’m planning my lessons, so selecting the best ones takes less time. To get a fair and robust bank of questions, it takes me one to two hours.

2. Sort the problems into levels of difficulty. Once you’ve found several problems and slightly adapted them to fit the criteria, it’s important to sort them into groups. Which of the problems will challenge your go-getters, and which have friendlier numbers for kids who need more processing time?

Make three to five groups of problems that can be given to the three to five levels of need in your class. I print them on different colors of paper, and I never keep the colors consistent because I don’t want kids tracking themselves or their peers into ability groups. Here is the problem bank for our unit on data analysis.

3. Adapt the framework, and create a rubric. While the problem-solving framework mentioned above is great, it does not serve all standards. For each unit, I adapt the framework a little to reflect the math we are learning. It’s important to maintain some sections for each quiz. Always ask students to estimate before they solve, and always have them defend their answers and show their calculations.

It’s essential to have a clear understanding of what mastery requires. Our school uses a four-point grading system. Students can exceed, meet, approach, or not meet expectations. Doing the math accurately and defending their thinking is meeting expectations. How can you have students exceed? Do they need to make an additional graph? Create an equivalent expression? Solve using a different method?

When explaining this to students new to our school, I tell them that exceeding expectations is a 95, meeting expectations is an 85, and so on. Connecting the grading scale to a system that is familiar helps students and their families alike. Whatever grading scale you use, think this through before you give the assessment and explain the system to students.

4. Consider safety nets. With just one question on the quiz, it’s only fair to offer some support. An easy way to do this is with a checker. Once a student has solved their one question, they find a classmate with the same color question but different problem to serve as their checker. All students serve as checkers, and the job of the checker is to look at the work and decide if it’s correct. They are forbidden to tell the correct answer but are allowed to say that something is wrong.

The teacher can help the checkers by creating questions on the framework for them to answer. Once the checker is done, the student can revise their work and submit it for a grade. It’s important to explain to everyone that the checker is human, so mistakes might be made. Having students check for those who have a similar level of question helps prevent situations where the checker is unsure of the accuracy of their classmate.

A benefit of the checker system is that each student is required to apply their understanding of the math to a second question, which generally reinforces the standard. Reminding students of the possibility that the checker could be wrong does highlight the need to double-check the work both before and after it’s checked. In situations where a checker has led a classmate astray, I generally intervene before the final grade is rendered.

Another safety net that I offer is retakes. If a student does not meet expectations the first time around, they are encouraged to practice a little more and try again later that week.

5. Reflect on results. The first time we tried this, many kids did not meet expectations. This was demoralizing for all of us, but it forced kids to reflect on their own understanding of the standard. They practiced and tried again, and most were able to meet expectations.

While we know that grades are not motivating, we know that success is. A positive outcome of the one-question quiz is that kids work hard to meet or exceed expectations. This means they are using curiosity, content knowledge, stamina, and desire to solve interesting math problems. They also become better collaborators and better participants in mathematical discourse. Rather than simply giving answers to each other, they’ve changed their language to say things like “Look at that again” or “I like your approach in solving this problem.”

The one-question quiz requires a lot of teacher preparation and student commitment to trying. However, I believe it’s an accurate and fair assessment of whether or not students have command of the standards learned in class. Perhaps more important, it creates a collaborative community of mathematicians in the classroom. Shifting the focus from grades to understanding and problem-solving is the ideal outcome and well worth the investment of time.

This article by Nancy Ironside was originally published on Edutopia under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only license. Read the original article here.

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How Ohio schools reduced chronic absenteeism

TL;DR (By ZenEdPro): Ohio’s positive discipline approach, promoted by the 2018 SAFE Act, has helped reduce chronic absenteeism in schools. A Miami University study found lower absenteeism rates in schools using this method, showing it could be key in improving student attendance and engagement statewide.

By Anthony James

Schools in Ohio, like other schools across the country, are struggling to reduce chronic absenteeism, which spiked during the pandemic. But Ohio may have a head start on dealing with the problem, thanks to a 2018 state law encouraging a positive approach to discipline.

Six years ago, the Ohio Legislature passed House Bill 318. Known as the Supporting Alternatives for Fair Education Act, the law was a comprehensive approach to discipline. It set standards for school safety officers and limited the use of suspensions for children in the early grades. It also encouraged districts to use what are known as “positive behavior interventions and supports.”

This positive approach attempts to improve student behavior and a school’s environment by emphasizing prevention over punishment. The idea is to stop problems before they happen, reward good behavior and give extra help to students who need it the most. At its most basic, an intervention could be a teacher using proximity to students to keep them on task or praising students who behave well. A small number of students may need more extensive support, such as counseling and outreach to the student’s family.

Studies have shown that schoolwide use of these positive interventions can improve children’s concentration, boost student achievement and increase student engagement.

Under the 2018 law, the Ohio Board of Education must set standards for putting the positive approach to discipline into action. These standards, in turn, must be included in grades K-5 as part of teacher preparation. The law also provides teachers and administrators training on how to use the positive approach as part of their professional development and continuing education. Districts that implement the positive disciplinary method receive extra points on their report card from the state.

Positive approach, fewer absences

According to an unpublished report by a team of scholars from Miami University, the state’s efforts to look on the bright side of discipline have had a happy side effect. Chronic absenteeism – when students miss 10% or more of school days, regardless of the reason – was more than 4 percentage points lower in schools that implemented the positive behavioral approach than in those that did not. A 4% difference can equal thousands of kids statewide.

Persistent absences can result in reduced academic achievement and graduation rates.

As a professor and researcher who has studied the use of positive behavior interventions, I was co-leader of the Miami University research team whose efforts showed that policy changes, combined with nuts-and-bolts help on putting the new program into practice, can lead to better outcomes for students. Our analysis demonstrates that Ohio’s approach can also be a model for states having problems with attendance.

Funded by a School Climate Transformation Grant from the U.S. Department of Education, our research sought to determine whether the positive approach reduced chronic absenteeism, one of eight areas in which the state expected improvements. To do this, we examined the impact of the grant from the academic years starting in 2018 through 2023, collecting data directly from school personnel who attended training sessions on positive behavior methods. We also reviewed data from Ohio’s Education Management Information System, a collection of statistics on primary and secondary education.

Ohio schools that implemented a positive approach to discipline had lower rates of student absenteeism than those that did not for three out of the four academic years – the exception being the 2021-22 academic year. According to data from the 2022-23 school year, schools that implemented positive discipline had an average chronic absenteeism rate of 27.93%. In the same year, schools that had not adopted the positive approach reported a rate of 33.33%. While 5.38% may not sound like much, this disparity equates to thousands of children, which has major repercussions for Ohio towns. To reduce chronic school absences, Cleveland focuses on positive family support.

Chronic absenteeism was an ongoing problem in Ohio’s K-12 student population before the pandemic. Months of online education and repeated disruptions to in-person classes sent rates through the roof. In academic year 2018-19, the baseline, schools that had implemented positive discipline had a chronic absenteeism rate of just 16.67%, the Miami University team reported. By 2022-23, that rate had increased to 27.93%, a jump of 68%. Schools that had not implemented the approach saw their rates of chronic absenteeism rise from an average of 19.52% in 2018-19 to 33.33% in 2022-23, an increase of 71%.

Positive discipline is only part of the solution

From the 2021-22 school year to the following school year, Ohio’s overall rate of chronic absenteeism went down slightly, to a statewide average of 26.8%. Still, it remains a critical issue.

Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, Ohio’s Department of Education increased its efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism in schools and districts in 2022-23. The initiative, the Chronic Absenteeism Improvement Indicator, compares a district’s rate of chronic absenteeism against benchmarks set for annual improvement. This is all part of the new star rating system.

Ohio’s adoption of the SAFE Act and a positive approach to managing student behavior are first steps toward its goal of improving the learning environment and increasing student engagement in school.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story may have overstated the numerical size of a 4% difference in absenteeism.

This article by Anthony James was originally published on The Conversation under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only license. Read the original article here.

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Why is most scholastic research never read by those it most benefits — and can we change it?

TL;DR (By ZenEdPro): After realizing that most scholarly work is only read by other academics, the author began writing for broader audiences through various platforms. By adapting their writing style and focusing on relatable content, they aim to bridge the gap between academic research and the general public, ensuring that the insights benefit a wider audience.

By Patriann Smith

At the start of 2024, Scientia Global, an international platform that opens dialogue between science and society, published a lay article about my work on X (formerly Twitter), amassing a viewership of over half a million.

Attention to one of my academic articles that it referenced was itself almost immediately transformed: the piece shifted into the 99th percentile and was ranked in the top five percent of over 25 million research outputs across all sources, according to Altmetric. In fact, it held the top spot out of 198 research outputs that Altmetric has since tracked from Cambridge University Press’ Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL) where it was published, scoring higher than 99 percent of its peers.

Devoted as I am to understanding the dynamic connection of academics to the lay public, these altmetrics greatly intrigued me. In academia, much time and energy are devoted to our highly regarded top-tier, high-impact scholarly journals, sometimes requiring scholars to spend years working towards preparing an article for dissemination, only to recognise that the readership largely failed to match up to the expectation.

While relevance and timeliness influence which scholarly articles make it to the big leagues, I was becoming increasingly aware that a broad corpus of research in such journals — widely read or not — were often only accessible to the very scholars that were already part of the echo chambers within which I was conversing. “If I am a public scholar working infinitely for the public good,” I thought, “why is it that most of my research is either inaccessible or will never be read by a lay audience?”

Instead of publishing for impact based on academia, what if I could connect with broad and diverse audiences — the very people whose realities continued to inform my research life? What if I could write for the human in each and all of us?

As a deeply abstract thinker, this research goal presented me with the greatest challenge. I struggled to naturally construct sentences that were not complex, and found it difficult to wrap up a sentence unless it was six lines long. I know that my writing can still come across heavily to readers.

It quickly became clear that the journey would require a lot more than merely identifying avenues for writing and connecting with the public. It would demand a new way of thinking, living, being, doing, and working in translation and in conjunction with the beating heart of multiple and diverse audiences. Was I up to the task?

I submitted a piece to the International Literacy Association’s Literacy Today magazine. The editors were gracious, helping me translate my thoughts so that more people could understand my research. Via my Research Gate profile, the article began to gain traction with a broader, though still fairly limited audience — certainly not half a million, but a great start for a budding “translation” academic enthusiast. And so, I tried again.

The Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS) asked me to write a blog post about a 2016 piece I had published in the journal Policy Insights for the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. I renamed it and, third time being the charm, was invited by the London Society of Economics (LSE) United States American Politics and Policy (USAPP) blog to write about research I had recently published. These international outlets aligned with my focus as an immigrant and transnational scholar with Caribbean origins. I was thrilled!

Having published the links to these and subsequent posts on social media channels, I was determined to see how the public engaged with the content. What caught their attention? Did they respond to the ideas? What did they choose to share? What questions did they ask?

From this informal, anecdotal research process, I could see there was significant room for improvement. How could I get individuals across various spheres, whose emphasis was not transnationalism, immigration or racialisation, to read and engage with the material?

I would come to see that in writing for scholars, I had to leave myself behind. Like being confined to the ivory tower, this required a relinquishing and an intentional embracing of vulnerability. I needed to make myself seen. Even as I shared intellectual findings, I could be human. Someone once told me she felt more connected to me when I spoke rather than wrote. How could I bring the relatability of my speaking into the writing process and thereby transform it?

This was how I came to embark on a freeing of the mind and self via a newfound partnership with Global Voices (GV), which constantly strives to maximise its readership not only in terms of content, but also by way of translation into various languages — not to mention its capacity to connect using knowledge that caters to individuals perceived as originating from the “Global South” as much as those with roots in the “Global North.” My first two pieces for GV were thoroughly edited based on these and other aspects such as tag lines, titles, and keywords, resulting in pieces that laypeople across geographies found it easy to access and pleasant to read.

In fact, it was because of my learning from Global Voices that I came to unapologetically write a piece on Black immigrants in the United States and another “not so lay” article in the  Journal of Language and Literacy Education.

For me, the journey of translating academic research for wider audiences does not always result in a massive viewership, but it does not need to. In the various communities with which academics connect daily, I find it increasingly important that the research I share with colleagues becomes a part of how I engage with the world.

This article by Patriann Smith, Ph.D. was originally published on Global Voices under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only license. Read the original article here.