Matrix

Seventh grade students at Carteret Middle School are participating in the MATRIX program. We have been granted 30 laptops, a printer, SkillSurfer, and a SMART interactive board. The Math Achievement To Realize Individual excellence (MATRIX) grant program is designed to increase student achievement in mathematics in grades six through eight by providing classroom teachers ongoing professional development and in-class support that focuses on integrating technology into the curriculum and instruction. The data is gathered through the test results from the SkillSurfer program.

The students take tests on SkillSurfer once a week. These tests are individually assigned to each student. The results, which are analyzed by item or concept, are then used for data-driven instruction. This data helps to target student weaknesses and strengths. Educators can use data to plan diverse instructional strategies in response to the differences in how students think and learn.

The seventh grade uses the Connected Math program, which focuses on “big ideas of middle grades mathematics, teaching through student-centered exploration of mathematically rich problems, and continual assessment to inform instruction-reflect the distillation of advice and experience from these varied sources.”

The following were developed by the authors of Connected Math, and provide an understand of how the “investigations” work:

The "big" or key mathematical ideas around which the curriculum is built are identified.
The underlying concepts, skills, or procedures supporting the development of a key idea are identified and included in an appropriate development sequence.
An effective curriculum has coherence-it builds and connects from investigation to investigation, unit-to-unit, and grade-to-grade.
Classroom instruction focuses on inquiry and investigation of mathematical ideas embedded in rich problem situations.
Mathematical tasks for students in class and in homework are the primary vehicle for student engagement with the mathematical concepts to be learned. The key mathematical goals are elaborated, exemplified, and connected through the problems in an investigation.
Ideas are explored through these tasks in the depth necessary to allow students to make sense of them. Superficial treatment of an idea produces shallow and short-lived understanding and does not support making connections among ideas.
The curriculum helps students grow in their ability to reason effectively with information represented in graphic, numeric, symbolic, and verbal forms and to move flexibly among these representations.
The curriculum reflects the information- processing capabilities of calculators and computers and the fundamental changes such tools are making in the way people learn mathematics and apply their knowledge of problem-solving tasks.

The integration of technology, provided by the MATRIX grant, will provide a rich learning experience for the seventh grade students at Carteret Middle School.