This software is intended to be used for assessment, not instruction.  The primary purpose is to collect speed and accuracy data for basic facts, then provide teachers information to help them make better instructional decisions.  This program can be used on a single computer at the back of a classroom or it can be installed on a server allowing an entire class of students to use it at the same time.

Quizzes

For each operation there are three different levels of basic fact problems.   Each cluster of basic facts is organized around common thinking strategies that children use to solve these problems that they do not yet know.  Each time the students take a 15-item quiz, the problems are randomly selected from that cluster of facts.  It takes about five minutes for an entire class to take a quiz.  The maximum amount of time that it can take is seven and a half minutes because the students are timed out after thirty seconds on each fact.

For each operation there are also three levels of mental computation problems.  Each is a bit more difficult.  It may not be so important to track achievement for these, but it does give the teacher a good sense of the mental computation fluency of students.  Unlike the basic facts quizzes, this part of the program might be used for instructional purposes as well.  They also present an interesting challenge for students.  For example, a second grader may be challenged to solve 430 - 50 mentally.  Or a fourth grader might be challenged to solve 40 x 30 mentally.

Reports

After students have taken a quiz, the teacher can get a report that indicates the number of seconds that it took for the student to respond to each fact that was presented on that quiz.  The report also indicates which facts were answered correctly.  More importantly, the report indicates if a student can benefit from more instructional time on that specific thinking strategy.  If so, the teacher is referred to previews and strategy practice for that thinking which are in the print materials from Thinking With Numbers.  Any time that a student takes a quiz, that data is saved by date and time and can be viewed in a report.

Progress reports for an individual student are also available.  These provide an indication of the progress that a student has made from any given date to any other given date.  The increase in speed and accuracy are reported.  Printouts for

Class progress reports are also available.  For each operation, these indicate increases in speed and accuracy from any given date to any other given date.  They also provide information about the progress of all the subgroups a teacher or principal might want to examine, based on the required subgroups for NCLB.  These class reports also provide the teacher information that can easily be used to inform instruction.  At the top of the report are a list of students who can benefit from additional instructional experiences for each of the three thinking strategies that are commonly used for that operation.   The teacher gets information to help them group students for additional instruction.  A table also identifies students who are doing well,  those who are guessing, and those who are counting or using some inefficient thinking to solve problems.

All of the above reports are available for a specific thinking strategy for a specific operation, or all the basic fact quizzes can be combined to present an overall report of achievement.  This overall report includes only the latest data that is available for each specific basic fact. All of this data can be imported by another teacher as the students use it from one year to the next.  So, teachers can trace a student's performance over two or more years.

All of this data can be printed on most printers.  However, Thinking With Numbers cannot guarantee that every printer will allow this.  It depends on the configuration of the printer.

If teachers use a single computer at the back of the classroom, the data can easily be e-mailed to the principal.  After saving the attachment on the desktop, it can be imported into the program by simply identifying the file with the data.

Principals can merge data from several classrooms in order to get a grade report for all the students at that grade level.  For example, if there are three fourth grade teachers, the principal can simple import and merge that data by indicating those teachers and get a school-wide report for grade four.  Similarly, a curriculum director can get a district report by importing and merging the data from every school building.

Principals and the curriculum director also have the option to export the data to a spreadsheet.  From there, other statistics and graphs are possible.

Should a school participate in a research study with Thinking With Numbers, the program also has the capability of sending data back to Thinking With Numbers anonymously.   An administrator simply indicates the experimental or control group that is involved and the data is sent, with no way for the researchers to know what school district, what school building, what teacher, or what students are included.  The grade level and the demographics are preserved, but all identification information is removed.

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