 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
The pilot project was carried out at two schools, Hogg Middle School and Cypress Grove Intermediate. Hogg is a predominantly Hispanic inner-city Houston school where the majority of students are classified as at-risk. Cypress Grove is a school in College Station, Texas; the school is one of the best in the state. In addition, the students selected from Hogg were below-average for the school, while the students of Cypress Grove were nominated as the best in their advanced math classes.
|
Students at the two schools spent a semester working with the system. Most of the time spent by students was from a computer lab at their school. At Hogg Middle School, the students had a class especially for working in the RM system. At Cypress Grove, teachers used the system as a supplement to classroom instruction, sending stronger students to a computer lab while reviewing with weaker ones.
Teachers and RM personnel refrained from instructing students during the class session, so all learning took place over the computer. At Hogg, the project was designed as a pretest-posttest experiment with a control group. There was no randomly selected control group for Cypress Grove Intermediate.
Many students chose to log into the system from home during their free time in addition to the time spent in class. In fact, several spent substantial time online from home, playing problem solving games or working in Guided Study mode. It was not uncommon to see students logged on past midnight and on weekends. |
|
Guided Study was the main learning mode in the system. In this mode, students solved problems and read theory material. The latter is why at first, students had difficulty with the mode. They had not been taught to think in terms of theory and in terms of why, instead just learning algorithms for solving simple problems. Some students didn’t even know what the word “theory” meant!
However, as the semester progressed, students liked the mode more and more. If at first it was difficult to get them to work in Guided Study, at the project’s conclusion all of the students preferred the mode to every other mode – including problem solving games and virtual classrooms.
|
|
|
|
RM’s animated mentor-figure, the genie, was immensely popular with the students. The genie worked with them in Guided Study, and communicated through the system’s internal email tool. It also greeted them every day when they logged in.
The children were eager to become friends with the genie. Many regularly wrote emails asking about what it meant to be a genie and how the genie’s day was going. In addition, students felt comfortable asking the genie for help with math, either by posing specific questions or asking to be placed in a classroom with a tutor. |
|
Tutors from all over America and from abroad gave students lessons when they had trouble with the material or wanted to know more than Guided Study could teach them. The students were very enthusiastic about the virtual classroom mode, which was a vital supplement to the Guided and Independent Study modes.
|
 |
 |
Students loved the Game Room. Often, students could be found online past midnight over the weekend looking for someone to play against. In addition to multi-player games, many students spent considerable time with Dino Island, a single player interactive game.
In addition to playing games over the ratios and proportions of the RM curriculum, students could play over riddles – problems requiring little theoretical knowledge, but a good deal of creativity or non-standard reasoning. Riddles were perhaps the single most popular subject for games.
|
|
|
To measure student achievement, a pretest and posttest, both designed by RM, were administered. These tests covered only ratios and proportions, and had a wide range of problem difficulty; an independent board of educators confirmed the validity of the tests. In addition to the pretest and posttest, scores from the Texas state mandated test, the TAKS, and the Stanford-9 were used to compare the achievement of students in the test and control groups.
RM administered an anonymous attitude survey to students at the conclusion of the project. Among other things, the survey asked students what they thought of the system, what they liked most and least, and if their attitude towards math had changed as a result of their work with RM.
|
|
|
