MATHia Workspace Overview
Understanding Concept Builders Workspaces
Overview
In Concept Builder workspaces, students engage with a variety of instructional strategies—explore tools, animations, classification tools, and worked examples—to develop their understanding of math concepts. These workspaces provide students with essential learning opportunities to prepare them for the Mastery workspaces that follow. Concept Builders that occur at the end of a Unit make important connections and/or summarize the learning from the previous workspaces.
Just as with Mastery workspaces, MATHia supports students as they learn in Concept Builders. There are on-demand hints if they ask for support and just-in-time hints if they make multiple errors.
While students are working, MATHia collects the number of errors students make, the number of hints they ask for, and the amount of time spent in the workspace.
In MATHia, a concept builder workspace provides a fixed number of problems for you to practice that concept. To finish the workspace you must complete all the problems.
How do we communicate progress in Concept Builder Workspaces?
The progress rings in Concept Builder workspaces communicate to the student which problem they are on and how many problems they have left in the workspace. It also displays which step they are on in their current problem and how many steps they have left in that problem. Students move on when they complete all learning activities within the workspace. In short, this gives the student the view of their progress to completion for the workspace.
Understanding Mastery Workspaces
Overview
Mastery workspaces have long been the heart of the research-based approach behind Carnegie Learning’s software. Mastery workspaces provide students with highly individualized and self-paced instruction that adapts to their exact needs to deepen their conceptual understanding of the mathematics. Through adaptive learning technologies, they engage in reasoning and sense-making. As students work through Mastery workspaces, they are both developing and demonstrating their knowledge.
In MATHia, a mastery workspace gives you problems that let you demonstrate the mathematical skills you are learning. To complete a mastery workspace you must work through an indefinite number of problems until you have shown mastery of all the skills in the workspace.
How do we communicate progress in Mastery Workspaces?
The progress rings in Mastery workspaces represent MATHia's estimate of the student's knowledge of each skill. When you first start out learning something new, the skill starts at zero. But as you work, and you get things right, then the skill increases. That’s because MATHia has evidence you are learning the skill. The skill can go down, however, when you make a mistake or ask for the answer. That's because those actions provide MATHia with new evidence, which informs a revised estimate of how well you know that particular skill. When this happens, you’ll see your current estimate of mastery as well as your ‘personal best.’ If MATHia estimates that the student has mastered the skill, it will turn green. Students move on when they master all skills in a workspace (workspace is Mastered) or when they reach the maximum number of problems in a workspace without demonstrating mastery (workspace is Not Mastered). In short, this gives the student a view of their progress to skill mastery.