STAD: Extra work...

• During the first week there was about 2 hours extra work for me due to the STAD-method (for 50 students). This included correcting weekly exams and generating the excel sheets for counting STAD-points.
  
  
• Making the weekly exam did not cause any extra work (easy exam can be generated during the lesson from teachers hat)
  
  
  
• I'd estimate, that after this initial hurdle, the extra work load will be about 1/2 hours / week / 50 students.

BASICS: Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD)

Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) is a method from USA (John Hopkins University)  http://www.successforall.org/ . Unfortunately I did not find any free material related to STAD in the net, please correct me if you find something.

My source-book for STAD is in Finnish [1]. The following is based on my understanding on STAD applied in upper secondary school mathematics.

PLAN

1. Divide class to heteregeneous (sex&ability) groups of 4 students for 6 weeks (half of our teaching period). This was done also in Kagan-team-learning
   http://yhteisoiminnallistaoppimista.blogspot.fi/
   
2. Weekly structure: we have 3 X 75min lessons/week. There is a 30min exam in the end of each week.
   
3. Lesson Structure:
• I teach the topic in ~15mins including going through the examples found in the text  book. I should ask questions from randomly chosen students during the examples to see whether they gather anything and iterating until no more uncertaintity, this may take a lot of time.
• Students solve problems in groups, asking first help from their mates.
• I show answers to some problems on the blackboard.
• Some of the problems are given as homework, so if you work well your homework has been done during the lesson.
• Hopefully we can play with some Kagan structures during the problem solving period (to not to get bored on problems only).
  
4. Grading, either
   
   • Exam +- 1
   • 8/12 exam + 3/12 weekly exam + 1/12 home work
     


5. Feedback of the weekly exams. Student should get three grades: his/hers base score (based on last course, 40-100), grade of weekly exam (4-10), score of improvement:
   
   • 0: exam score x 10 < base score -10
   • 10: (exam score x 10- base score) within 0..-10 
   • 20: (exam score x 10- base score) within 0..+10
   • 30: (exam score x 10- base score) within +10..+20 or exam > 9
    
6. Teams compete in  score of improvement. The best group(s) are notified at the first lesson of the weak (also the weekly exams are returned at the first lesson of the week). This competition should not be too serious and it is not affecting the grade.
    
7. An example spreadsheet to calculate points of improvement and scores for the groups www.iki.fi/markus.kaukonen/Data/stad-malli.xls

[1] Sahlberg&Sharan "Yhteistoiminnallisen oppimisen käsikirja" 2002.