Implementation of Action Research

Earlier this week, I implemented both my oral and written timed tests (pre-tests) with my students. I was assuming students would not do that well on their pre-tests and in my observations, I was correct. However, according to parent surveys, many parents expressed their child was able to know all facts and I perhaps thought some would do fairly well. After implementing the written one minute timed test, the student range was 15 (scoring 0 to 15). The mean was 7.88 facts correct. Whereas with the oral one minute timed test, the student range was 21 (scoring 3 to 24). The mean was 11.22 facts correct. Results were mixed in that 4 students did better on the written portion whereas 13 students did better on the oral portion and 1 student did the same on both. I assumed students would do better on the oral as no writing was involved.

I did observe that many students needed to use his/her fingers on both the written and oral assessments. There were a few students who did not use their fingers and they were able to correctly recall more than 20 addition facts on the oral assessment.
After implementation of the oral and written timed tests, I began to talk with students about number sense and included number sense activities and discussions. I focused largely on quick images in which I showed students images with a certain number of dots. Then asked students to talk about the number seen along with how did they figure it out. This led to discussions with a partner as well as whole group.
We also started our daily math games/activities in which students started a game individually where they rolled a die and had to say the number rolled. I was rather surprised with how a few students responded with the die, a few had to use one to one correspondence when counting the dots on the die - they did not know the numbers automatically. Students then were given two dice where they had to roll, and then say the equation with the sum. For instance, if a student rolled a 4 and 5. They would say "four plus five equals nine."
Throughout the week, we built routines and gradually moved into the same activity with partners. Students did the same activity with a partner, emphasizing the equation and the sum orally with the partner.
The hardest aspect so far has been finding the time to incorporate our number sense discussions/activities along with our daily math games. I believe building number sense along with daily practice will help students become more fluent with math facts.