Collaborative Module Design Project-High School Transition Course

      For many students, the summer between eighth grade and ninth grade can be the scariest time.  You are preparing yourself for a new school, and a new kind of learning.  In middle school, you do not earn credits for your classes, where in high school, passing a class is an important part of graduation.  With the new state initiative of requiring four years of math, I feel that we could better help our students by providing some kind of assessment to them over the summer months to transition them better into ninth grade.  This could alleviate some of the problems that we encounter in ninth grade, such as improper leveling or students being flagged with learning disabilities.


      For our Module Design Project, Elizabeth Ferry and I created an online course to test students over the course of the summer between their eighth grade and ninth grade years.  In my district, many students make the transition to their ninth grade year without passing all of their classes.  There are also students that are not correctly placed into the correct classes (Honors vs. College Prep)  This transition course would help us eliminate some of those issues that we have in the first few weeks of school.

      We began this project by first deciding what topics to focus on.  We decided to focus on two modules to begin with.  We focused on fractions for module one and decimals/percents for module two.  I feel that these are important modules to focus on because the material is covered in eighth grade and is covered again in the college prep class, but is not covered in the honors class.  Therefore, if the students excels on the topic, they could be a candidate for the honors level Algebra course.

      After deciding the topics, we began to look for online resources that would work well with the topics.  We viewed different tutorials, websites and games to incorporate into the website that students would be viewing.  This took a lot of time, as we did not want students to be bored or get lost.

      Once we had decided on websites, tutorials, and online worksheets to use, we added these to our transition course website with instructions for the students to complete.

      At the end of each module, students must complete a Google form that tests their competency in the appropriate module.  The Google Forms can be found here (as well as a link on the website):
Module One-Fractions Assessment
Module Two-Decimals and Percents Assessment


The students must also blog about their experience with the topics and give feedback to the moderators and teachers.  They must answer the following questions in their blog post:

• What resource did you feel was most helpful with this unit?
• What questions or difficulties do you still have with the topic?
• Are there any additional resources that you found on your own that were helpful to you when reviewing or learning the topic?  Please provide the names or links to the resources.

 The link to the blog can be found here: High School Transition Course Blog

The link to our transition course website can be found here:

High School Math Transition Course

      I feel that this design project could definitely be broadened and used in multiple districts.  With SBAC becoming a completely computer based test, asking students to complete a summer assessment online would not be too much out of the box.  I think that this would be something students could access, at home, on tablets, phones, or at the library.  It is also something that could be expanded for different levels and different classes.  I think that we have an interesting idea here.