Teach students healthy goal setting

According to a study by the Stanford Research Institute, students using DreamBox scored 2.3 points higher on the NWEA assessments with gains equivalent to 5.5 percentile point in 16 weeks. Another statistic shows that by completing just five or more DreamBox lessons a week, U.S. students grew 1.58 grade levels in one year.

If you think those statistics are impressive, you’re right. But how can teachers help students set meaningful goals and stick to them?

Kids love DreamBox because the lessons are more like playing computer games than traditional math classes. As a result, students may be more interested in setting a goal while completing five to eight lessons each week.

Built into DreamBox are three really important components: Intelligent Adaptive Learning technology, a self-monitoring dashboard and achievement awards. Let’s look at them individually to show how they work together to help students build healthy goals.

What is Intelligent Adaptive Learning?

Intelligent Adaptive Learning technology, hardwired into DreamBox, follows every click of a student’s mouse to compute how that child solves problems. As it tracks the data, the technology adapts to fit the student’s proficiency. It also recognizes gaps and ultimately chooses next lessons to help students fill those gaps and move forward. While children build math confidence with each lesson, they experience a rigorous, research-based, pedagogically sound curriculum aligned to the Common Core and state standards within a highly motivating learning environment.

Self-monitoring dashboard

Start students on DreamBox and show them how to set a goal of five or more lessons a week. Then give them the responsibility of monitoring their goals. As a teacher, you may know how the DreamBox Insight Dashboard reports help you plan your instruction, but students can also watch their own progress on the student dashboard. They can see how many lessons they completed, how much time they spent on lessons, what they’ve learned and where they need to work a little harder. Plus, they can see their accomplishments and achievements, which is often the impetus to keep going.

Achievements and celebrations

Another important aspect of DreamBox is that mistakes are welcomed (bet you didn’t expect that one) — they are seen as trial and error, which is a great learning tool. At the same time, successes are acknowledged and rewarded. DreamBox certificates and awards can be used to recognize students as winners of competitions, individual student achievement or classrooms that make great progress over a semester. These little perks add up to a lot of self-confidence and pride.

Student engagement

When it comes to helping students set goals, these three aspects move to the head of the class for inspiration, engagement and confidence building. A former math teacher described how he assigned his daughter a DreamBox lesson before she was allowed to play video games. He only asked for 20 minutes. One and a half hours later, the child came into the room and said to her father. “Thanks a lot Dad. I got so busy, I spent an hour of my video game playing time on DreamBox.”

Sometimes, when students are engaged, goals just set themselves.

This is the fourth article in our back-to-school blog series spotlighting ways that DreamBox Learning is supporting teachers and students this Back-to-School 2021. Read other articles in the series to learn about top dashboard reports, new features and lessons, introducing students to DreamBox and reorienting negative self-talk.