Analysis of Student Performance

Summary:

When reviewing my students’ assessments after I have completed my lesson, I

have noticed some trends within their work. I chose to have my students complete a 3-

question exit slip as their formative assessment. I created a rating scale to score their

responses. This exit slip assessed three specific skills within my lesson on elapsed time.

The first skill that I assessed was to solve for the amount of time that has elapsed when

given a starting and ending time. The second skill was to just solve for the ending time

given the starting time and the duration time of an event. Lastly, the third skill that was

assessed was to solve for the starting time when given an ending time and the duration

time of an event. Each skill pertains to my three objectives; therefore I made one question

for each skill on their exit slips. The students had the potential of scoring a 3/3 on this

exit slip.

All but three of my students (13/16 or about 81%) completely understood the

second skill that was assessed (solve for the ending time given the starting time and the

duration time of an event). I think this skill was easier because the students are familiar

with concept of adding hours and minutes to a given time already. Once I started

changing the given information, the students started to struggle. The percentage of my

students that understood the other two skills that were assessed unfortunately dropped.

Only 10/16 or 62.5% of my students accurately completed my “Skill 1” question (solve

for the amount of time that has elapsed when given a starting and ending time). They

struggled to count the hours and minutes that they drew on their timelines in order to find

the time that was spent. Lastly, only 3/16 or about 19% of my students understood the
third skill that was assessed (solve for the starting time when given the ending time and

the duration time of an event). This confused a lot of my students because they had to

count backwards in time. They have had some practice with counting back from hours in

the past, but not enough to fully be able to count hours and minutes backwards.

Overall, my students did not perform as well on their assessment pieces as I

would have liked them to. I created a key at the bottom of my rating scale determining

their scores as proficient, basic and below basic. When reviewing their scores, about 19%

of my students scored ‘proficient’, about 31% scored ‘basic’ and about 50% of my

students scored ‘below basic’ on their formative assessment exit slips.

Strengths:

My students’ overall performance on their exit slips was the strongest on question

#2. Since I assessed three different skills with three different questions on their exit slips,

many of my students showed strength with understanding the second skill/objective. My

second objective was for my students to solve for the ending time given a starting time

and the duration of an event using the mountains, hills and rocks strategy. 13/16 of my

students understood this concept, and accurately answered #2 on their exit slip correctly!

Out of the three students that did not get #2 correct, two of them needed more time/asked

for help on how to solve all of the questions on the exit slip, and the other student just had

an addition error. He created a ‘22 minute hill’ and then proceeded to add two rocks,

representing 24 minutes, when the question only asked to represent 22 minutes. I do not

think this error affected his understanding of how to add time to a given starting time, I

believe it was just a small addition error with his hill.

and rocks on their timelines as they were adding time. I knew that I had to emphasize this

as I taught it, because it is a common mistake, but only 3 of my students forgot to label

their starting times, which did mess up the rest of their times. Although my students had

some alignment issues with labeling their timelines as they went, I was still happy to see

that they were writing the amount of hours and minutes they were jumping by and then

following up with labeling the updated time after adding those mountains, hills and/or

rocks.

Weaknesses/ Errors:

A general error that I was seeing in all but one of my students’ performances was

their alignment of their times on their timelines. As I stated in the strengths of their

performances, they all did have their times labeled, but a lot of them were not in the

correct spot. This was messing up their final answers because it was confusing to have

the wrong time written under an added mountain, hill or rock. This common error was

confusing students on what times to add next, therefore resulting in the wrong answers.

When reviewing the data from the exit slip, only 10/16 or 62.5% of my students

got #1 correct. This question was assessing their skill of solving for the amount of time

that has elapsed when given a starting and an ending time. (Question #1: Finnegan started

hunting at 3:16pm. His dad called him inside for dinner at 6:30pm. How long was he

hunting for?) Three of my students had all the mountains, hills and rocks drawn and

labeled correctly, just simply made addition errors when adding up their

mountains/hills/rocks when stating the amount of time that has elapsed. One of those
students was confused with all of the questions on the assessment and received a 0/3 on

his exit slip. Another student added 30 minutes to 5:56 and wrote 5:86, making a time

telling error. And the last student forgot to add the 3 hours to his answer and only gave

the amount of minutes until the next hour (14). I think that my students could understand

this concept better if I had taken more time to explain that they must add up the time that

their mountains/hills/rocks represented to find the elapsed time between two times.

Unfortunately my students struggled with question #3 as well. My third

objective/question on their exit slip was to solve for a starting time when given an ending

time and the duration time of an event. (Question #3: Keenan was watching a movie that

ended at 9:12pm. It was 1 hour and 42 minutes long. What time did Keenan’s movie

start?) Only 3 of my students got this question correct. 3 of my students did not answer

the question at all. One student had a subtraction error in which he subtracted an hour

from 9:12 and got 8:00. The last student that got this question wrong did not label his

timeline at all, so he was unable to count backward from the given ending time. The other

8 of my students made a common error of beginning to counting up after they subtracted

the first hour. For example, they would subtract an hour from 9:12 and get 8:12 and then

jump 30 minutes back and label it 8:42. This common error proved that these students

need help with counting back in time when it comes to chunks of minutes and/or

individual minutes.

After reviewing my data and analyzing my students’ work, I realized I made the

exit-slip way too difficult. I wish that I made the word problems simpler because my

students were getting confused on the wording of the problems, instead of focusing on

the math behind them. I could tell that the exit slip was too difficult for them when they
were raising their hands asking me what to do next, or where to go from where they were,

when we were working on the problems as a class. Since they were not grasping the

different kinds of elapsed time questions as quickly as I thought they would,

unfortunately the weakness/errors of my students exit slips outshine the strengths.

Remediation Plan:

A remediation plan that I think would apply well to the students that were

struggling with my assessment piece would be to review the 3 skills I taught in more

depth before giving them such difficult word problems to solve. Since my numbers of

proficiency were very low, I believe that all of my students could benefit from getting a

deeper explanation of how to solve for different types of elapsed times word problems.

When going into deeper explanation of these 3 skills, I will focus on just the

elapsed time skills on their own, and then I will bring in some word problems. Starting

with having my students just solve for the amount of time that passes between two

given times using the mountains, hills and rocks strategy. I will ask them to just find the

time between 4:00pm-7: 15pm. This will help them see the 3 hours and 15 minutes

easier than it did when I asked something along the lines of “If bob started work at 4

and ended at 7:15 how long was he at work?” I will practice many problems just like

this. For example, just giving them (3:30-6:15,) (2:45-9:25), or (7:20-8:10) and asking

them the time elapsed between those two times. Once they get these problems down

(Skill 1), I will move onto practicing skill 2 with them.

When remediating the second skill in my objective, solving for an ending time

given a starting time and the duration of an event using mountains, hills and rocks, I
will give them simple word problems which will be along the lines of, “If Bob’s

practice starts at 3:15 and takes 2 hours long, how long was he there?” This will allow

them to see 3:15 and 2 hours easily in the word problem so they can set up their

timeline with the starting time and understand that they are solving for an ending time.

If they are still having trouble with these types of word problems, I will say what is 2

hours after 3:15. This will be more familiar for them, as they already understand how to

add hours to a given time. Also giving my students easier chunks of minutes to work

with in the beginning will prevent any confusion of creating mountains and hills. Once

I see that they understand how to chunk times (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45minutes) then

I will move onto questions with more awkward times.

In order to remediate my last skill, solving for a starting time given an ending

time and duration time of an event using the mountains, hills and rocks strategy, I will

start off with simpler questions. For some examples I will ask “What is 3 hours before

6:00pm?” “What is 30 minutes before 9:10am?” “What is 26 minutes before 3:00pm?”

This will get them to count backwards, starting off with just hours, then adding an even

chunk of minutes, and finally having them solve for times that are more difficult to

chunk, including minutes. For my advanced students, I will give them word problems

that are similar to question 3 in my previous exit slip, (Keenan was watching a movie

that ended at 9:12pm. It was 1 hour and 42 minutes long. What time did Keenan’s

movie start?). This requires students to chunk an awkward amount of minutes together

that go into another hour, which is a more difficult skill for learners that are just being

introduced to elapsed time problems.

learning experience for me. I now know that I should not have given my students such

tough assessment questions that required higher level thinking the first time I

introduced the concept of elapsed time. I think a lot of my students would have

understood the material more if I gradually gave them more difficult problems with

individual minutes that went into the next hour. In conclusion, if I were to teach my

lesson again, I would have started off with the basics instead of trying to fit so many

skills into one days lesson.