Don’t Remediate, Accelerate Learning with Mandarin Matrix

Students at Tarwater Elementary School, a public K-6 school in the US, share their experiences and results using Mandarin Matrix’s Online Classroom while studying at home during the pandemic. Here are their findings.

How Do We Tackle Learning Loss Caused by the Pandemic?

A Case Study at Tarwater Elementary School, Chandler School District, Arizona

The challenge
Due to the pandemic,  students were given the choice of attending in-person school or attending online school during the 2020-2021 school year. When the DLI students chose to attend the Chandler Online Academy (COA), their instructional time for learning Mandarin was down to 30 minutes per day, while their peers at in-person school had half-days in Chinese language arts in addition to content areas.  How to make up for the learning gap in Mandarin for the online group of students became a challenging task .

The goal
The goal was to maintain the online students’ Mandarin proficiency at their current level to try and keep up with their peers when they were eventually reunited in school.

How did we tackle the learning gap?
Tarwater Elementary School utilized effective online Mandarin learning resources to build an extended Mandarin literacy program by:

• Adopting Mandarin Matrix DLI Proficiency Builder as our core curriculum.  The spiral up proficiency readers from Foundation ( Novice Low) to Intermediate 3 (Intermediate Mid) levels align to ACTFL and Common Core standards which provided the framework for our students.

• Choosing essential language concepts and skills based on the MMX Curriculum Map and Teacher Guides.

• Utilizing the MMX Student Online Platform to individualize students’ reading tasks. Students were assigned to read different levels of books based on their proficiency.

• Using the online exercises and worksheets provided by MMX to build a routine for students to follow. Each day, we tackled a learning area and celebrated students’ successes on Fun Fridays when we used interactive games to review and have fun

• Collaborating with parents to secure their full support to use reading logs to record the books their kids read every day.

The result:
By the end of the 2020-2021 school year, Third to Sixth grade DLI students had the option to take the STAMP test to assess their Mandarin proficiency.  In the 1st quarter of 2021-2022, the Tarwater Elementary DLI program also did a key vocabulary test based on the MMX Proficiency Builder series. Per the data from both the STAMP test and the school-wide pre-test, the students who chose to attend online school met or exceeded the program goal.

The conclusion:
Tarwater students did not experience learning loss, and in many cases accelerated their learning with the support of Mandarin Matrix Online Platform despite having a fraction of the learning time that their in-class peers experienced.

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