Pearson Successmaker Math Efficacy Study 2009-10 Final Report

SuccessMaker Math RCT Gatti Evaluation Inc. 9-15-10Additionally, one teacher has a hearing impaired interpreter in her room, and another has aspecial education teacher in her room.All six elementary teachers prefer to use a combination of skills-based and discovery-basedteaching methods. Teachers teach math whole group for about 60% of the time, and use smallgroups about 40% of the time. A number of classroom strategies were present during mathinstruction. Two of the six teachers frequently use leveled instruction, and half frequently usecenters. All teachers used center activities and speed drills to some extent. Only one teacherreported using seatwork, and infrequently at that. As far as technology use for teaching math,educational websites and computer games were employed to varying degrees. One teacherreported frequently using their interactive white board.The district adopted program for the middle school was a widely published basal mathcurriculum with an early copyright date. Both 7 th grade teachers strictly adhere to the districtcurriculum and have been using the curriculum for an average of 6 years. The teachers havereceived training on the district adopted curriculum. The math daily blocks last an hour-and-ahalfand both teachers have assistance from paraprofessionals in the classroom. Both teachersprefer to use a combination of skills-based and discovery-based teaching methods and teachwhole group about 75% of the time. One of the teachers sometimes used centers for mathinstruction, and only occasionally used leveled instruction or cooperative learning; the otherteacher did not use these teaching strategies. One teacher infrequently used educational websitesand computer games while the other teacher used educational technology two to three times perweek.Those teachers randomly assigned to use the SuccessMaker Math program from both schoolswere trained two days before school began. These teachers also received additional trainings inSeptember and December. Students in the elementary school were baseline tested the third weekof September and tested again the second week of May. Students in the middle school werebaseline tested the second week of September and were post tested the second week of May.Students in the elementary school stopped using the program the first week of May and studentsin the middle school stopped using the program the second week of May. These schools place aheavy emphasis on state testing and there is a lot of pressure for students to do well. This year,for the first time, all students were required to take the state assessments online, which limitedthe amount of time the 7th grade students had on the program during the second half of theschool year.The elementary school has a dedicated up-to-date computer lab with over forty stations. Theelementary SuccessMaker teachers took their students to use the program in the computer labthree days a week for twenty minutes. Additionally, one 3 rd grade teacher used the program onclassroom stations about 30% of their total usage minutes. The median 3 rd grade student usedthe math program approximately 27 hours, attempting 48 exercises every thirty minutes with asuccess rate of 73%, while the median 5 th grade student used the math program approximately 33hours, attempting 44 exercises every thirty minutes with a success rate of 74%.The middle school had an older computer lab with at least 30 computer stations. The computershad to be updated in order to meet the technology requirements necessary to run theSuccessMaker program. The SuccessMaker teacher at the middle school took her students to usethe program in the computer lab two days a week for 30 minutes as part of to their normal block- 27 -