My hunch for this inquiry was that the DMIC approach could help to raise maths achievement and language acquisition with priority learners in the classroom.
This hunch was based on previous years experience, where I had noticed that many of my learners working 'Below the National Average' would fail on questions not because of the maths itself, but their lack of understanding of what the maths was asking them to do. Rather than wrangle with the problem, these learners would too often jump into what they thought (or guessed) the equation was and in doing so work it out incorrectly. Yet when given the equation directly they almost always had a far higher rate of success at answering the problem correctly.
I believe that the launch aspect of the DMIC process will greatly help these learners. In particular their understanding for what each maths problem is asking them to solve, i.e. what is the story of the problem about, and what are you trying to do with it. Working in groups with learners at a higher level, and watching and listening to their strategies for unpacking the problem will hopefully help as well.
A secondary aspect to this inquiry that I wish to implement, is a stronger focus on language acquisition of technical maths language. The graphs below show that there is a larger gap for this group between the national average in Literacy than in their Maths* (*with the exception of a couple of outliers). My belief is that by increasing their arsenal of "Maths language" they will have greater success at comprehending the maths problems they are faced with.
The Graphs
These graphs show my target group of 9 Year-Six learners working "Below" or close to "At" in maths at the End of last year. The red line shows the national average. I thought it would be interesting and revealing to show the Maths data alongside the Literacy data to see if there were any trends that I could spot. Not too surprisingly, the most obviously trend was that almost all of these 9 learners were falling behind in their literacy more than in their maths.
I think this helps to support my hypothesis that language acquisition in maths will ultimately help lift maths achievement levels, as it supports my own observations where success has been blocked due to comprehension of the problem.
* I thought it was worth noting that I don't usually consider a "Overall Gloss score" or "Global score" as it can provide quite a warped view on the individual learner if their scores aren't streamlined across the 3 fields. However for this graph it was the best way to show results.
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