Subject
My population of interest are New York State elementary students, a mixture of 4th and 5th graders). My sample is to choose one elementary school from each borough, Manhattan, queens, staten island, bronx and brooklyn. It will be a total of 200 students being tested and 100 students testing the common core fraction game. The experimental group are the students playing the game and testing their achievement. My control group are the 100 students that are not playing the game and testing on how well they do with regular testing strategies. The way I will go about recruiting the students is one elementary school from each borough will be tested. For each school 40 random student will be elected, a mixture of 4th and 5th graders. 20 students will test the game in the school and 20 students will not. The 20 students who do not, will focus on regular teaching strategies used in class for fractions.
Apparatus
The common core mainly focuses on developing critical thinking, problem solving, and analytical skills students will need to be successful. Fractions is a broad topic that is difficult to learn among young children. Difficulties in learning fractions lies between conceptual and procedural knowledge. Students focus on numerators or denominators as separate numbers rather than thinking of the fraction as a single number another difficulty is children identifying the procedure and how they came up with their answer. The materials that will be used to design this game are the Common Core standards 5.NF.A.l,(adding and subtracting fractions), 5.NF.A.2 (Solving word problems). My experimental group will be using the game to improve on fractions and my control group will be using their notebooks and pencils for regular teaching strategies used to learn fractions.
Procedures
I would like to know whether my control or experimental group is effective for children to learn fractions, The experimental group will be responsible to solve fractions and fraction word problems. Students will be working in a group against the other group, to see who can come up with the answer within 5 mins, before time runs out. This will help students collaborate with each other in groups and use critical thinking to solve and explain how they came up with an answer. The control group will be working individually to solve fractions and fraction word problems.