Teacher & School
Rebecca Bair, 4th Grade Teacher
Bear Creek School, Elizabethtown, PA
Key Challenge
Students struggled to retain and apply computational knowledge to complex algebraic problems.
SMART Solution
SMART Board® 800 series
Lumio
Result
93% of students improved 10+ points on algebraic from pre- to post-assessment. 95% of students improved on their geometry pre- to post-assessment, with 76% improving 10+ points, and the remaining students moving from proficient to advanced.
“My daughter and I watched he video last night and she picked the strategy she felt most comfortable with. Thank you for this!” — Elizabethtown Parent
Motivation
Bear Creek School is a grade 4-6 school located in a rural community outside of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania containing approximately 930 students. Rebecca Bair is a 4th grade teacher and 21st century professional learning leader in the Elizabethtown Area School District.
Through her experiences of teaching 3rd to 5th grade, Rebecca has come to see that her passion is teaching the whole child. She focuses on providing opportunities that will help her students develop a growth mindset while progressing socially, emotionally and academically.
Although Rebecca’s students perform at a high level, she noticed her students scored lowest on operations and algebraic thinking. She believed her students needed more opportunities to work on meaningful activities, that would lead to more time-on-task, and strengthen the foundational skills needed in algebraic thinking.
Why SMART?
Rebecca wanted to increase the opportunities her students had to effectively and efficiently work through various problems, which would incorporate a variety of algebraic skills. She chose to use SMART products to provide her students with access to tutorials and examples they could review anytime, anywhere.
SMART implementation
Since the majority of her instruction was delivered through SMART Notebook® software, Rebecca decided to use instructional audio in Lumio. With the Lumio instructional audio, she created short videos, which captured her lesson content and voice, in a user friendly Windows® media file format.
By posting her instruction and lesson content online, Rebecca was able to provide her students with more opportunities to strengthen the foundational skills needed to complete more complex problems. By using instructional audio, her students had access to a resource they never had before, their teacher at home!
How SMART helped to improved learning outcomes
Within a week of posting her first few videos, Rebecca noticed an increase in successful completion of complex homework problems. In fact, she was overwhelmed by the feedback parents were providing for this new resource. One parent stated, “my son did his assignment all by himself! He watched the video first, but when he got to the multiplication part he still didn’t understand. I had him watch the video again, and do his problem along with the video. I was excited to see that he was now able to do it.”
By the end of the year, 93% of her students had improved their fractions score by 10+ points pretest to posttest. She also saw a similar improvement in geometry, where 76% of her students gained 10+ points pretest to the posttest. What makes the geometry number stand out is that 70% of those students that didn’t improve by 10+ did move from proficient to advanced. Therefore 95% of her students showed some level of improvement on these foundational skills.
Incorporating the instructional audio into her instruction during the second semester allowed Rebecca to help her students take control of their learning, by increasing their opportunity to practice previously learned skills in a format that was more engaging.
