We show data on how well and above our students are performing, where we have students and more!
Background
When ScienceTeX debuted with its first class in the beginning of August, we had a variety of students ranging from 4th graders all the way to entering 9th graders. We at that time made a conscious decision to teach two classes, to cater to the different timezones that our students lived around the USA and Canada. Now, five weeks in we have achieved the feat of teaching 6* and 3* concepts of college-level (AP and IB) Biology and Chemistry respectively, through five 75 minute lessons. You read that right, we have taught material in AP biology and Chemistry not only faster than a traditional high school, but to many students that are on average, 6 years younger than the intended age for these concepts.
How did we achieve this feat?
It all starts with a custom curriculum. If you tried to implement the AP and IB curriculum directly, and tried teaching it to young elementary and middle schoolers, you would almost instantly lose their interest, attention span, and they would most likely struggle at grasping these advanced concepts. So how did we do it? It goes without saying, "The best teachers are the most fun" and that cardinal rule applies here. We design our lessons around being fun, incorporating real world examples that they already know and understand, and connect and build upon that. Additionally, by applying the principle of filling in their gaps, of what they do know and don't know, we can easily teach them concepts that they will have never even heard of before. We also believe in continuous assessment, interactive diagrams, making the student become the teacher, and more. The variance in grade levels is not a problem, as for many of the science concepts, an older student may have a greater understanding since they learned it in school, but our classes targets and easily lifts the younger student as we fill in the parts that they have not learned to bring them up to the older student level. At that point, we are able to teach both younger and older the exact same material, and to our tests we also have determined that the younger student performs rather similarly to the older student, even through drastic age differences.'
Additionally, we find that having a mixed class of different grades and ages makes it more fun for the students, as they are discovering new people, and gaining new exposure with students of different grades. At the end of the day, everyone is learning something new, and it shows.
On To The Results!
From our initial testing (through usage of Quizizz) from each class, our aggregate result is that on average, we are getting 80.9% on average on all material assessed so far, and that is a rather conservative number at that. This is because our quizzes are designed by us, and we believe that applying mass critical thinking in problems is key to a high level of understanding of the material taught. Additionally, this doesn't even factor in the review that we do, as when we do a second pass on the material, they are bound to do better than original.
This score is aggregated through taking the raw score that the students received, extrapolating it to see, what they struggled on, and applying a 1.25 correction factor. This correction factor, is due to the speed of the lessons, age differences, and the difficulty of the material. (Additionally we may also adjust the score due to any question errors on our part) We expect to see the score increase as time goes on, and recent testing is showing that.
How Ahead Is This And What Does This Tell Us?
On average, 6+ years. Most of our curriculum is AP and IB syllabus derived in addition to some concepts that we believe are most beneficial. The ahead years amount is derived from taking our student’s grade levels and then averaging it to find a median. This is well ahead of even the most advanced magnet schools. We also, are teaching in a much faster pace, and this is all enabled due to our custom curriculum and teaching style.
Our initial results are very positive. These metrics are well beyond our initial expectations. In addition, much of the material is interconnected, and these results show that the kids are remembering. With each new lesson we are trying newer methods to teach, with more interactivity and live whiteboard demonstrations and a lot more application of new technologies and "gamifying" the assessments. Time will introduce more improvements and we will only see more impressive results as time goes on.
Thanks for reading! We hope to see your child soon!
If you would like a PDF of the data here, and more you can download this-
(* The 6 and 3 concepts said that we covered in 5 weeks are AP Biology 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and AP Chemistry 1.7, 1.8, 2.5 we may also have covered other concepts that we did not disclose here.)
(The Average years younger is derived from us averaging the ages and grade levels of our students.)
If you have any questions or suggestions, please email us at contactussciencetex@gmail.com
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