Power User Stories: The Power of Randomizations

Nov 08, 2022

This week our Marketing Director, Arianna Irwin, got to talk to Canyons Online teacher and Derivita Power User: Kathleen (Katie) Nelson.


Katie has been teaching for fourteen years. She currently teaches math to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at Canyons Online within Canyons School District in Sandy, Utah and this is her second year using Derivita.


Kathleen Nelson


You can watch her full video interview below or on our YouTube channel. You can also read some of her story highlights detailed below the video.


Last year the Canyons School District contacted with Derivita, “to create content that aligned with our open-source math curriculum, called
Open Up Resources Math or Illustrative Math and Derivita created the practice problems, the assessment problems, and everything - I utilized all of that last year with my online learning students and this year I am using the additional questions that Derivita’s Content Team has been working on for that Middle School level”. 


Katie continues to describe this newly created Middle School level content as still aligning with her curriculum, “but there’s a lot more options”. She goes into describing her favorite Derivita feature that didn’t exist in the initial set of practice problems that was available in the Derivita Math Item Bank. This feature is Randomization. 


“It’s nice because the students can attempt the same question three times and if they don’t get it in their practice on the third attempt, then they can regenerate the question. They can see a solution first and then regenerate the question, they get that feedback, and then they get to try it again with some slightly different numbers or a slightly different sized shape, or whatever it is they’re working with”, Katie explains. 


What makes this feature unique is that it goes further than just giving the students “the feedback that they got it wrong” and making the students “distraught and not actually learning”. Instead they get to keep trying until they master the concept. 


She adds that this year, she has seen an improvement in her students’ performance and engagement levels, which she accredits to the Randomization feature as well as the other technologies her students interact with on a daily basis. She explains, “For the kids who are engaging well all the time in our online learning - there is a dramatic increase in their performance. Students who were doing moderately well last year are doing exceptionally well this year because they have more opportunities for that practice and that feedback and to try the very same thing again as many times as they need”. 


Katie admits she was a little hesitant at first when Derivita was first introduced to the district. She says, “ At first, I was like I don’t know if I’m gonna use this ‘cause I already have these same kind of practice problems built in Canvas, I’m not sure if I want to switch to something new, but when I saw some of the features that were in Derivita that I couldn’t build in a typical Canvas quiz I got excited about it and I’ve been using it ever since”. She uses Derivita every day in her online classes; “the short practice they [the students] do every day and their weekly quiz is all built through Derivita”. 


Katie does describe the “learning curve” of Derivita to be relatively “intuitive”. She says “most of the time it [Derivita] is very intuitive, even for these eleven-year-old kids, who are working by themselves in their houses. They don’t need the kind of supports that I’ve had to use with other digital tools and I’ve been really grateful for that”. 


And her favorite part of the teaching and learning process is seeing the growth and progress of her students one question and one concept at a time. She says, “I will audibly cheer whenever I can see that evidence of learning. That’s one of the most exciting parts about being a teacher is to see that growth and to see, especially whenever the progress has been kind of slow with one particular student, then all of sudden, boom, and it just explodes”.


Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel here.



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