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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!

The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.

According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake.

Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.

Panamath measures your number sense and approximate number system (ANS) aptitude. Recent research has demonstrated a relationship between performance on this test and basic mathematical ability. Through a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, we have made this test publicly available free of charge so that researchers can use it in their studies, educators can assess their students, and anyone of any age can test themselves.

Based on impressive results, which showed that students who observed the 3D simulations made a big jump from their pre-lesson to post-lesson test scores while outperforming control groups who received traditional instruction, the company in 2005 received $200,000 from the Illinois State Board of Education to broaden the study to more than 1,000 students in grades 3 to 8.

The results virtually duplicated those of the smaller study. Students who observed the 3D lesson improved an average of 32 percent from pretest to post-test, with substantial gains in every subgroup.

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.

This new teaching and learning style, often called “flipped” or “inverted” learning, makes the students the focus of the class, not the teacher, by having students watch a lecture at home and then apply the lesson with the teacher in the classroom.

they should be able to leave my class knowing how to question, research, and test scientific claims regardless of what they choose to do afterwards

At the same time, I also feel that those students who do excel in STEM fields need to have classes that push them and challenge them with real-world problems, and not just memorized facts from a textbook.”