DENNISON MASTER PORTFOLIO 1

Learning Statement

“Learning” is not a straightforward task that can be assigned to a person or task.

Learning takes place when there is quality instruction paired with a ready recipient. As

seen in this artifact, instruction does not always go according to plan. The task of

teaching kindergarten students the name of coins seemed simple but had to be simplified

even further to accommodate the needs of the students in order to meet the learning goal.

The first task was to assess baseline knowledge of coin names. This one-on-one

interview style of assessment was time consuming but provided much needed

information about student knowledge and confidence about their ability to name the

coins. Kyriakides and Campbell (1999) do not believe all results of assessment are

worthy of acting upon, but baseline assessments, especially in math for younger students,

are highly effective for planning teaching strategies. Some first-year students have

achieved many of the mathematical aims for the school year already. Others have not

achieved any of the aims prior to entering school. Baseline knowledge helps a teacher to

plan lessons, paths of engagement with the material, and partnering, if ever applicable, in

lessons.

Given the lower socio-economic status of most of my students, having real coins

was a part of the learning experience I did not want them to miss out on. This instinct

proved to be a great motivator for some of the students. The quick morning meeting

lesson involved a bag of coins that the students could touch, hold, describe, and share

with their neighbor. Brenner’s (1998) experience observing kindergarten lessons for

naming coins described the experience as not successful. Students were shown multiple

representations of coins but never handled real coins. There were pictures of the coins
DENNISON MASTER PORTFOLIO 2

and good fake replicas but never the real thing. The author did not speculate why the coin

lessons were not successful but for my classroom population, the value of money is not

lost on them. They did not know the specific value of each coin but they knew that

money is desirable. The level of engagement was high, I believe, due to their interest in

handling the real coin. The Education Week Research Center (2014, p. 11) gave a nation-

wide survey to educators and teachers and found that student engagement was correlated

to success above teacher quality, school environment, and family involvement. Lessons

that relate to real-world application were believed, by 97% of those surveyed, to promote

higher engagement from the students (Education Week Research Center, 2014, p. 30).

Gillies and Baffour (2017) discuss the value of different modalities when teaching

new material. They also put value on letting students verbally make their thinking known.

The artifact describes multiple ways individuals could explore the coins and discuss what

they observed. Students handled real coins, created patterns using coins, colored pictures

of coins, and attempted to phonetically spell the name of each coin. With each coin,

students spent time talking to a neighbor about what they saw on the faces of the coin and

completing a stem sentence to share with the class. For kindergarteners, it is a delicate

balance of too much varied representation and too little. We had to concentrate on one

piece of money at a time or they became overwhelmed and confused. I believe the multi-

modality of the presented information kept students engaged and the material felt

interesting, even for those that could name all the coins according to the baseline

assessment.
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Post-assessment spoke to the success of the coin-naming unit. Almost all students

could name more coins than before the unit began. Mastery was not accomplished by

many of the students but was not expected for this age group.
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References

Brenner, M. E. (1998). Meaning and money. Educational Studies in Mathematics,36(2),

123-155. Retrieved from

https://egan.ezproxy.uas.alaska.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.a

spx?direct=true&db=eft&AN=507652826&login.asp&site=ehost-live

Education Week Research Center (2014). Engaging students for success [PDF document]

Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/media/ewrc_engagingstudents_2014.pdf

Gillies, R. M., & Baffour, B. (2017). The effects of teacher-introduced multimodal

representations and discourse on students’ task engagement and scientific

language during cooperative, inquiry-based science. Instructional Science, 45(4),

493-513. doi:10.1007/s11251-017-9414-4

Kyriakides, L., & Campbell, R. J. (1999). Primary teachers perceptions of baseline

assessment in mathematics. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 25(2), 109-130.

doi:10.1016/s0191-491x(99)00016-4