so what I'll talk about today I'll discuss who we are so quick Smart's part of simmer at the University of New England so I'll just give a little bit of detail about that I'll talk about why quicksmart is needed and you might already have very specific ideas about why you think quickmart is needed at your school I'll also talk about what quickmart is so what is the program what it involves talk about why it works and then what you need to do at your school level so I'll talk about what we provide as part of the program and then what you guys will need to [Music] do so we're part of simma as I mentioned at the University of New England now simma stands for the national Research Center in science ICT mathematics education in Rural and Regional Australia so Sim's actually been going for 20 years this year and while it has Rural and Regional in the title its focus has broadened to obviously Encompass all issues of national concern with respect to education so the quicksmart program has actually been going for more than two decades and the co-creators so you've got professor John Peg from the numeracy side and Professor laurine Graham from the literacy side and professor John Peg is the current still the current director of simmer so it's been going for more than 20 years which is a substantial amount of time and we've got I guess lots of students that we've helped during that time and it's over 80,000 that we know of that have gone through the quicks smart program and there's hundreds and hundreds of schools every year that are using the quicks smart programs to support their students learning so if you do quicksmart you do have access to us that is we support you through the process and you're not alone I don't want anyone to feel like they're alone when they're conducting the quicks smart program so if you've got questions about the program and actually you know this is happening for one particular student what should I do those sort of questions so there's someone to help you throughout running that quicksmart program at your school so why is the program needed so I guess the philosophy at quicksmart is that intelligence is learnable and incremental and it's amazing how many people will say they're not good at maths maths isn't my pho oh my parents couldn't do maths I've never been good at maths and they're very happy to volunteer this information pretty much to anyone and it doesn't have to be the case many more people or students than is currently the situation can become capable and active Learners particularly to do with mathematics and of course all students deserve the right to meet their expectations for their particular year of schooling if we look at some napan data it it's similar to the previous year so 2023 is data that it's found one in three students in Australia do not meet the expectations for their particular year of schooling and this is quite disheartening uh data and as I said the same as last year but can't be compared to previous years because the napan changed their categorization last year it's quite disheartening to think of all the time and effort you guys are spending at a school level one and three students isn't Meeting those basic capabilities for their year level and there's certainly an geographical disadvantage as well so the further you go from Metropolitan regions the less students are meeting those expectations so by the time you get out to very remote schools it's a third of students compared to a metropolitan region that meet those expectations so there's certainly a great need out there in our schools for helping students with their new numeracy because what starts as a a small crack as they've written in this particular report becomes a Chasm basically if students fall behind they're less able to participate in their classroom lessons and they can fall further and further behind over time because they're just not at the point where they can participate and that's regardless of their level of advantage that they struggle to catch up on their own and I like to say the quick smart program enable students to catch up so that they can keep up moving forward but the disadvantage does affect how much they do fall behind so if you look at this particular report from 2023 and their disadvantage measure was the parents level of schooling so their disadvantage group were students whose parents did not finish high school and the advantage group was students who had parents who had bachelor degree or above they found what was a gap of 1 year and 7 months in year three by the time the students got to year 9 it was a gap of four years and that's quite alarming to think that year 9 students gap of four years they're still operating in a primary school level so they're falling further and further behind other students and of course that's what we don't want to happen for our students so what is quickmart then and what why does it work for students so quicksmart is based on ideas of cognitive science and how the brain learns so it's an intervention program for middle school students so years 4 to nine who are underperforming in either literacy as I said we have a companion literacy program or numeracy which is the one I'm talking about today so we do recommend not to use it for years three and Below because there are developmental things that have to happen for students and based on the curriculum as to when they need to be able to use all four of the operations for example it isn't actually cap year 9 we have quite successible programs in quicksmart for adult learners but it does get more tricky at a high school in year 10 and Senior to pull students out for intervention programs they're less likely to be willing to do that and you know there's all sorts of different things happening apprenticeships and other things in those senior years and of course the earlier you can assist a student then they won't be falling further and further behind through those middle years so year 4 to year n so we're offering students a a second chance and potentially a last chance to become active and confident Learners in the classroom and one of the things the schools talk about when we come back at the middle of the year when they've started their programs is the change they see in students in their other classrooms so not just in the quicks smart CL lessons but in their classrooms the teachers see the change in students they're more confident they're more willing to take risks put up their hand and answer a question for example so they're becoming much more engaged in their lessons generally so we're improving the speed accuracy and understanding of basic mathematics so those three elements are very important the understanding is extremely important for students to be able to extend and use and apply their number facts so we we call it quick smart so it's got both both those elements in it of the speed and accuracy as well as the understanding because students won't just need to know their basic number facts up to 12 for example they might need to use what they know about you know 6 plus 4 in terms of decimals so 6 Plus point4 or 4,000 plus 6,000 for example so they need to develop that understanding so they can extend and use those number facts in a wide variety of contexts and that's included in the program as well so a facil fa itating students active engagement and participation in their wider classrooms and providing that solid foundation for them to be able to participate and for the F The Learning in their classrooms that they're trying to do based on the syllabus in enable students to perform at levels comparable with the average achieving peers in standardized tests so even though we're not teaching specific syllabus items necessarily in Quicks Smart IT enables students to perform and show great improvements in things like napan or patm or the other variety of standardized tests that we have throughout Australia and it provides gains which are maintained and even extended years into the future so what we're trying to do really is give students skills they need for life because having those fundamental functional numeracy skills opens up opportunities for learning throughout the education as well as for employment and just participation in basic activities that they need to do so with respect to the response to intervention framework the quicksmart program Falls within a tier 2 because you are working with a pair of students so a small group at a time using a validated Intervention Program but it has most of the elements of the tier three program as well that is that it is an individualized program so the two students are not on the same Learning Journey so it is individualized for each student within the program and it's got frequent data collection and Analysis of that throughout you don't have to do a SE separate assessment aside from what's already embedded within the lessons and that gives you all that fantastic formative information to inform where where the students are going through the program and their progression through the program so I mentioned we're developing those three aspects their speed their accuracy and their understanding as part of the program we've got that feedback assment Loop built in so students getting immediate feedback you can work on What that particular student needs so they're getting individually targeted deliberate practice on their specific area of need so the quick smart program they can't fail it or can't be left behind as they might feel they are in a classroom environment it goes at exactly the pace that student needs based on what they're doing so we're developing neural Pathways for automaticity with those those basic number facts and I'll talk a bit further about what automaticity is in a moment but we're trying to develop really strong neural Pathways for them so the these our skills students will have all the rest of their lives because we're ultimately trying to free up the working memory so the working memory is the the bottleneck of our thinking and learning if you like it's where our thinking happens but it is constrained with respect to capacity and duration so we don't want students using up those very valuable working memory spots for things that should be quick and easy for them because if they're still struggling to work out 7 + 5 they're not going they're using up the working memory slots and they're not going to be learning how to add fractions or do Algebra whatever they're using that particular number fact four so as I mentioned it's all about automaticity so automaticity is the ability to complete an everyday task so it doesn't just apply to mathematics effortlessly without conscious thought or a step-by-step process and we all develop automaticity in lots of our things of Our Lives for example most of you I'm sure can drive a car and if a dog ran out the road in front of your car you wouldn't be thinking oh which pedal do I have to hit for the brake you have automaticity with that so you can use your working memory to be thinking oh do I need to Swerve or do I need to break how do I miss this dog so you can use that higher order thinking and that's exactly what we want for our students with the quick smart program if they've got autom with those basic number facts they can then be thinking about what's important and what they're trying to learn for example in their classrooms I will mention it is not just rot learning so as I said understanding is very much part of it and rote learning the best example I can give a root learning is it's how we learn the alphabet but if you were asked what's five letters in front of M you'd probably have to start from the beginning and then work your way back again and that's not what we want with students and Mathematics they need to be able to use and apply and extend their number facts and manipulate numbers in a wide range of context so it isn't just rot learning a report last year for example from the center for independent studies emphasized the importance of automaticity in Math's education they said that number facts should be learned to the point of automaticity to increase confidence understanding and achievement and these were the three areas they particularly saw the benefits for students they said the research on memory and learning was quite clear the limitations on the working memory affect learning when acquiring new academic knowledge so having that automaticity with those basic number facts frees up the working memory and supports students to manipulate new information as they build up more complex schemas in mathematics and schemas is how we store information in our long-term memory so it's quite clear that freeing up that working memory space and having automaticity with those basic number facts enables us to learn more complex things in mathematics so does the program work and and the short answer is yes absolutely so as I said it's been going more than 20 years and we have many reports I think we've got more than a decade worth of our annual reports up on our website free publicly available so you can see that it does indeed work and see the evidence that it does now I won't go into the statistics here a lot but at the top you can see there's a row that says all quicksmart students and it has an effect size of 067 so effect size is something that John Hattie has done a lot of research in and a typical student in a typical classroom will have an effect size between 0. 2 to4 and quite often you know round. 3 will therefore be a typical classroom growth within a year for a student so if a student for example here had .67 they would have you know 2 to three years growth within that particular year and that's certainly what you can expect with respect to your students on the quick smart program you can expect to see two to three years growth just in that one year on the program so enabling students to catch up so they can potentially be keeping up in the future to their classmates and thinking about it in terms of the stain ones in the patm and a patm remember is actually testing syllabus items so it's not just testing what's being taught and practiced within the quick smart program but the students transfer their learning to a whole range of areas once they have those fundamental skills it enables them to do the rest of the mathematics that they're expected to do so you can see here the preest that is at the beginning of the program students were quite skewed so this should look like a normal curve bell curve for a normal distribution you can see it's quite skewed to the left because these are obviously lower lower achieving students that were put on the quicksmart program and then after the quicksmart program significant shift towards the right looking much more like a normal distribution at this point so really can assist students and be quite transformational for some students to really change their trajectory of their Futures so what does the quicksmart program involve so basically the quicksmart program involves doing three lessons a week 30 minute lessons for ideally about 30 weeks over a year so you're working with a pair of students to one instructor for that 30 minute lesson three times a week as I mentioned the lessons have very consistent structure so the students's not using that working memory to think about what's coming up next it's got a regular and predictable learning sequence and has very high on task students time because because they're not being asked to concentrate or focus on one thing for that whole 30 minutes we've got short sharp activities that are developing their skills we're encouraging students to use thinking to access their prior knowledge understanding and use effective strategies for number facts that they don't yet know so as I mentioned we're getting that fantastic formative information inbuilt within the program every single lesson to assist with that ongoing design of the students Pro like program so their progression through it will depend on how they're doing it's got that consistent monitoring through out about their accuracy understanding and their retrieval times and it it's a highly motivational learning environment and it it may seem crazy if you haven't run the quick smart program that students could want to come to learn about mathematics but honestly the majority of students enjoy coming to mathematics the quicks smart numeracy lessons and learning about mathematics which is quite amazing giving a lot of those students probably very reluctant and I don't want to say hate mathematics but may be very resistant to mathematics but it's amazing when you see students that actually realize they can learn mathematics they get the self-efficacy and the confidence around mathematics which they can then take into a range of situations so in the program it includes a number fact for all the operations so addition subtraction multiplication division for the numbers 0 to2 and problem solving so that's all included within the program it's got extensive resource materials with a variety of different modes so we've got pencil and paper activities we've got computer activities we've got verbal responses like flashcards for example so there's a range of different activities within each lesson we provide the resources for these and and including games the qbsa so the quicks smart basic skills assessor is that computer assessment component that is embedded within each lesson which is part of the program that we provide and you do an initial pre then and final post test so before starting the program and after finishing the program for each student so you can see the students progress so you've got that evidence and the students have that evidence in fact they see their progress throughout the program and they get to experience genuine success throughout the whole program as they see their progress which is extremely important for them as they start to take ownership over their own learning and become internally motivated so what's actually in a quick smart 30- minute lesson so it starts off narrower so the focus is broadening As you move through the lesson and the cognitive load is building so at the beginning you've got some explicit teaching time the instructor is discussing specific number factor with students based on their area of need so each lesson is based on a particular Focus numberx set and the students progression will depend on how they do within that number fact set so the number of lessons you spend on a particular number fact set will be completely dictated by how the student is doing with that so it won't move on before the student is actually ready to move on so the first component as I mentioned You've Got That explicit teaching time and working with students on their specific areas of need to do with that Focus number fact set then got some flashcards for that particular Focus number fact set we've got some speed sheets so a pencil and paper activity which are extended number facts to do with that Focus number fact set then you have one student doing an independent worksheet related to what they're doing and one student doing their computer assessment component with the instructor and then you swap those two students so that they get to each do both components and then for the sixth component in a lesson you all come back together and play a Maths game so the Maths game obviously getting that deliberate practice for students with those maths facts also developing rapport and a lot of people talk about how supportive quicksmart students are of their quicksmart body for example so it's developing that rapport with you as the instructor and those two students with you and with each other as well as enabling sort of a fun atmosphere to have lots of informal matths discussions while you're getting that practice as well so that's what a less individual 30 minute lesson involves each time so what do we provide for the quicksmart program we provide the all the training you need to be able to do it so this involves three two-day workshops so six days in total over the course of the first year the first Workshop usually in term one enables you to be able to conduct your lessons so it gets you up to speed so that you can start implementing the program and conduct the lessons at your school the next Workshop we come back in around term three and we take a bit further from where what we did in Workshop one discuss how everything's going and we start to introduce problem solving so once students have some of those basic skills and develop some skills and confidence we start bringing in problem solving so that they can transfer their learning and then we come back at the end of the year in term four and talk about end of year processes annual reports for your school and effect sizes an understanding and interpreting results from the quicks smart program so you can understand and see the impact you've had with it so the professional workshops are all included we also provide the kit and the physical resources for the program so that involves a full resource kit with all the games all the Flash cards and all the those resources that you need for lessons all those resources are also available digitally so you've got access to our Quicks smart portal so you can you know access all the games and flash cards and all these sort of resources in a digital format as well it also includes that online access to that computer assessment part in your lessons we also provide some additional physical resources such as some user guides which again are available in digital format on the portal we provide a microphone some sample student folders Etc so we provide all the resources to really get the program started at your school what you guys will need to provide are the staff to be the instructors so you'll obviously need to Resource it such that you've got instructors to work with your students you'll need a space to conduct lessons now ideally this is dedicated to the the quicks smart program but if you don't have that sort of luxury and you're quite tight for space it could be some sort of shared space and I've certainly seen everything being done out there in schools to support students you'll need to organize your resources so have things like pens and pencils and highlighters and erasers and have your kits and things in that space to use you'll also need access to a computer to run that computer component that doesn't have to be a specific dedicated computer it can just be the instructor's laptop because it is an online program so you can just log in and access it via the web you will need a microphone for that component as well and you will need to do some some printing or photoc copying to have each student have their own individual folder as part of the program and we do Supply a sample student folder to demonstrate what should be in that particular folder something to consider is what students do get put onto the quick smart program so obviously we're talking about students who are underperforming in the area of mathematics and numeracy you can use basically any of the data you've got available to you to assist with which students you should put on the program so things like napan data obviously if you've got that available to you Pat maths so Asis Progressive achievement test in mathematics or checkin or any of the other number of different tests that you might do within your school there's also the diagnostic assessment which is a program which is designed as a screening tool so you can give it to large numbers of students at a time to give you information to assist you with working out which students would benefit from the quicksmart program that one is a separate license to the numeracy program you can obviously use the students School results and their attendance data as a byproduct of an Intervention Program quite often attendance can increase for students so they come to school more regularly when they're on a program like this but you need to consider at your school whether you want to consider attendance as a prerequisite for selection because you don't want your time and resources to be wasted such that you're sitting there and for students that are regularly not attending school because another student might be able to use the program and use that time and of course classroom teacher observations they see students regularly and can give you great Insight on which students you think would be beneficial so as I mentioned ones that are have experiencing persistent difficulties in the area of numeracy or basic mathematics ideally they display good attitude to learning in small groups because you will be working with pairs of students at a time and as I said you might want to consider how often they attend school as as to whether you want them to be on the program I've got here that they've got average academic potential without major attention difficulties problem behaviors or complex learning profile so the quicksmart program is not designed for any particular learning disorder or disability so students that might have more complex learning profiles you might need to consider whether they're suitable for the program for instance if they have an intellectual disability if they have a processing disorder they might need a very adapted program or another program that might be more specific to their particular learning needs But ultimately it's your choice at your school as to which students go onto the program so if you're starting the program for the first time as I said you get your professional development so it's six days for up to five staff members to be trained regarding the program so they can be instructors in the program as well as you know coordinators and principles or staff execs from your school all the physical resources so so we provide the kit we provide the all those fiscal resources and the games packs Etc we've also you get access to our portal and our online portal has access to that computer component as well as all those digital resources I mentioned so you get three years access to that so of course you keep your kits forever and after the three years you just need to subscribe a much smaller amount I think it's about $800 a year for access to that online component so of course you get online support from us so you've got access to us to help you anytime during your journey with the quickmart program as well there are additional discounts based on your school for example low enrollment schools if your school already has Quicks smart literacy there's then a discount for the numeracy program or if you've got a staff member who's already done the training there's a discount for that so there's a variety of different discounts based on your school's particular situation