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The underlying principle is simple: Students learn math by doing math, not by listening to someone talk about doing math. Interactive computer software, personalized on-demand assistance, and mandatory student participation are the key elements of success.

What is critical is the pedagogy: eliminating lecture and using interactive computer software combined with personalized, on-demand assistance.

Students spend the bulk of their course time doing math problems rather than listening to someone talk about doing them.

Sixth grade: Sixty-nine students, 1-2 hours a week, 45 percent passed. Of those who did not pass, four students gained more than a year’s progress in math on the TAKS test. Sevents grade: Twenty-six students 1-2 hours a week, 65 percent passed. Of those who did not pass, 3 students gained more than a year’s progress in math on the TAKS test. Eighth grade: Sixty students 1-2 hours a week, 63 percent passed. Of those who did not pass, 12 students gained more than a year’s progress in math on the TAKS test. After the second administration of the TAKS test, the total eighth grade pass rate rose from 74 percent to 86 percent. The only real difference was the use of Ascend Math for three weeks, where students worked six to nine hours a week before the second administration of the test. We had a few eighth grade students who have never passed a TAKS math in middle school or their entire academic lives until this year. We attribute this to the use of Ascend Math.

A major aspect was getting students to work on the program with fidelity. After meeting with students and parents, a rigorous schedule was implemented, along with automatic daily reminder phone calls and second calls to parents to inform them of the next day’s schedule. Students who missed a tutorial session are assigned a makeup day.

Parental buy in was important!

Ten Marks is one that focuses on math. A colleague of mine really liked it, although I have not registered my own students before. Another for both ELA & math assessments is Easy CBM.

Sokikom.com has a free component for number sense- fractions/decimals/prevents – that is very well developed, adaptive, and includes video tutorials. My students love it! They also have several components that one could pay to add on.

One site that I’ve found to be quite beneficial is ThatQuiz.org. Toying around has found quite a variety of items to introduce and review with the students, and it catalogs quite a bit of data, making it easy to pinpoint individual problems, as well as class issues with specific math concepts.

The MIND Research Institute has received a $250,000 grant from the Cisco Foundation to provide its visual math education program, ST Math, to 4,000 students in Arizona.

Many of the methods Winn uses were the brainchild of Carl Munn, a Crawford math teacher who saw that teens were baffled and demoralized by their math tests as early as algebra. So instead of barreling through the state standards, Munn slowed down and focused on fewer topics. He gave teens a chance to fix their mistakes on pre-tests and emphasized how math related to real life. Winn expanded on what Munn designed, spending his Saturdays crafting lessons for calculus at a coffee shop.

He has the fervor of an evangelist

mathematicians might worry that they're just teaching steps, not understanding. But Winn found teens liked steps. They wanted consistency and stability, things they might otherwise lack in their lives.

Einstein's students were developing too many shortcuts and not enough understanding.

While 71 percent of its fourth graders meet state math goals, only 17 percent of its 11th graders do.

At Einstein, the problem became clear when teachers gave fifth graders a simple test. They told them to put down their pencils and estimate answers to simple questions, different ones than they were used to.

These are the addition problems and method we all learned in school.

This app has you adding from left to right instead of starting in the ones place, which goes against everything I learned.

This one is unusual, dividing up some of the numbers into their parts (whole ones, whole tens, etc.), and subtracting the parts.

Introduced last week in its updated form at the FETC 2011 conference in Orlando, FL, the program, Math Fact Fluency, is an all-digital, Internet-based curriculum focused on the fundamentals of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

“Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution.”

“Reason abstractly and quantitatively. Mathematically proficient students make sense of quantities and their relationships in problem situations.”

“Use appropriate tools strategically. Mathematically proficient students consider the available tools when solving a mathematical problem.”

The SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium has released its content specifications in math.

• #1: Students can explain and apply mathematical concepts and carry out mathematical procedures with precision and fluency. • #2: Students can frame and solve a range of complex problems in pure and applied mathematics. • #3: Students can clearly and precisely construct viable arguments to support their own reasoning and to critique the reasoning of others. • #4: Students can analyze complex, real-world scenarios and can use mathematical models to interpret and solve problems.

a new draft will be issued for comment on Sept. 19. That's the day that comment on the first-round math content specifications is due as well.

I used the following with a group of fifth graders and the students have been moving further toward meaningful dialogue and conceptual thinking.