7th Grade Warm-ups                  Algebra Warm-ups

Results for 7th Grade Math 2008-9

Star Power Warm-ups: Grade 7 were first used with students during the 2008-9 school year.  I taught 3 periods of Pre-Algebra that year: a regular Pre-Algebra/7, a Remedial Pre-Algebra A course that went through 75% of the standards, and a SDAIE Pre-Algebra made up of 60% ELD students.  I was only able to complete 116 out of 130 warm-ups that year before the STAR test was given...I didn't follow my own advice and I skipped some days.  The following graphs show their progress over time by showing the class average number of questions they answered correctly out of 5.  This average fluctuates over time but the general upward trend is unmistakeable,

These warm-ups gave confidence and experience to half the 7th graders at Newhart Middle School (Capsitrano Unified) that were exposed to them.  The following chart shows the phenominal growth in the number of students school-wide achieving Proficient or Advanced on STAR 2009.  Imagine the results if all the 7th graders had used them.

The graph below shows the correlation of warm-up performance to actual performance on the STAR 2009 for these 3 Pre-Algebra classes .  The R squared value of 0.798 indicates that there is a viable relationship between the performance on these warm-ups and performance on the STAR.  Generally, the better these students do on the warm-ups, the better they actually do on the STAR test.

It is not much of a stretch to say that these warm-ups better prepare students for the STAR test than traditional textbook instruction alone.  The following graph shows the correlation of grades to actual preformance on the STAR 2009 test.  Here the R squared value falls below the viablity threshold of 0.75.

Results for 7th Grade Math 2009-10

The 2009-10 school year was interrupted by a teacher strike in Capistrano Unified, but my student results are still promising.  I taught 4 periods of regular Pre-Algebra 7 this year and was able to cover almost all 130 warm-ups before the STAR 2010 was given.

Below are actual STAR results for 2010.  Here you see another 7% lift in our Grade 7 math scores as one new teacher begins using the warm-ups (still one hold out).  Also, the Algebra warm-ups were implemented with the 7th grade class as well and we achieved 100% proficiency in just one year...amazing!