In October 2009 Gabriella and Paul Rosenbaum Foundation released a report entitled The Effect of Singapore Mathematics on Student Proficiency in a Massachusetts School District: a Longitudinal Statistical Examination. It shows that the longer students had Singapore Mathematics as their curriculum the better they performed on Massachusetts’s tests.
North Middlesex Regional School District (NMRSD) is a rural school district near the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, serving the towns of Ashby, Pepperell and Townsend. In response to poor student performance on state mathematics assessments, this district introduced a number of their teachers to the Singapore mathematics (SM) syllabus during a 2000 summer institute for pilot implementation that fall.
For effective implementation, new K-8 school curricula are most easily begun with K-1 or K-2, with another grade added each successive year. However, worried about their entering high school students’ inadequate math knowledge, NMRSD chose to address these concerns with an SM pilot in their “feeder” middle schools (grades 5 to 8). The pilot program was quickly extended across classrooms and grades. Kindergarten was added in the 2002-03 year and, as can be seen in Table 1 on page 10, every classroom in grades 1-6 was using the SM curriculum by 2005-06. From this point on, Singapore math was established as the District’s official curriculum.
A summary of the report may be found here and the full report is here.
THANK YOU – maybe, just maybe, this is the information our school board will listen to, as our plummeting math scores don’t see to matter to them.
@truthtopower Our math scores are not plummeting. I can assure you student performance matters much to the school board.
Jim Leous and the rest of the current school board deserve a great deal of credit for the recent attention they have given to the math issue in SCASD. It is a big change from June 2009, when some members of the Board said that it was not their place to assess curriculum and its effects on student achievement.
Jim is right to say that our math scores are not “plummeting”. The truth is that it is almost impossible to say what our math scores are doing. All we really can do is examine the percentages of our students that the state says are “advanced”, “proficient”, “basic”, or “below basic”. This makes it difficult to judge progress, because the cutoffs for these categories change from year to year, as do the PSSA tests. Since the states set the cutoffs, it is possible that advanced in one state translates into basic in another, and this is exactly what is found to happen when performance on national tests is examined.
With respect to SCASD, the problem with the tests that is motivating the Board right now is not that scores are plummeting, but rather that our math outcomes are not improving the way that other districts’ outcomes are, and that we don’t see a similar problem with reading outcomes.