The fourth installation in our EF+Math blog series is the final piece featuring our incredible project teams, this one focuses on Fraction Ball.

 

Introduction to Fraction Ball

As we announced in our opening blog of this series, Fraction Ball is one of three teams in the EF+Math portfolio that is continuing to develop and study our core hypothesis. The EF+Math program is investigating the big idea that the integration of executive function (EF) skill development in math learning approaches that address conceptual understanding and complex problem solving, in ways that afford equitable experiences in math learning, can dramatically increase students’ math outcomes. Each advancing team uniquely addresses the intersection of EF, mathematics, and equity, helping to answer EF+Math’s hypothesis and inform continued research and development in this intersection.

The visual below may help in understanding the complementary nature of each approach in the EF+Math Program’s portfolio.

Fraction Ball is an integral part of EF+Math’s portfolio approach as an innovative program that is reimagining how students learn fractions by combining physical movement, play, and mathematical thinking in uniquely engaging ways.
The Fraction Ball team addresses the long-standing challenge of teaching fractions, considered a crucial yet challenging gateway to advanced mathematical understanding, through its games which emphasize a playful learning approach, math-related emotions, fun, and collaboration. Math learning can elicit many emotions for students; Fraction Ball invites those emotions as part of the play and learning process. Further, Fraction Ball aims to increase the positive emotions, like joy and happiness, that students associate with doing mathematics, and decrease feelings of negative emotions, such as anxiety or stress. Fraction Ball implicitly supports students’ use of executive function skills in rational number learning contexts. Their work is also deepening our understanding of embodied cognition and students’ math-related emotions.

 

The Promise of Fraction Ball: Reimagining Fraction Learning Through Play

Fraction Ball’s focus on joy and play is unique and is a bright spot in innovative math learning. Bringing joy and play into math is novel in the field and intentionally designing for a playful context for math learning is transformational. This works to shift the mindset around math from something “boring” to something “fun”. And, research consistently demonstrates that mastery of fractions is crucial for future mathematical success. Often described as the “gatekeepers” to algebra, fractions and decimals represent a critical juncture in students’ mathematical journey. Fraction Ball’s approach is a promising solution for improving students’ learning outcomes on fractions.

Photo. Kenny Lewis

 

Fraction Ball’s program consists of a comprehensive 16-lesson unit, split between classroom activities and basketball court-based games, each running for 50 minutes. What makes Fraction Ball particularly special is its integration of rational number concepts into basketball-inspired games, complete with colorful court markings displaying fraction and decimal representations (e.g., 1/4-point, 1/2-point arcs) with an accompanying number line on the side of the court for scoring.

The program tackles key mathematical concepts that traditionally challenge students, including:
– Rational number understanding, including magnitude comparison
– Addition of fractions and decimals
– Translation between fraction and decimal representations by the placement of numbers on 0-to-1 and 0-to-5 number lines

We know rational numbers are an area where challenges come up in student reasoning, which impacts their executive function skills and their ability to try new strategies to solve problems. When learning fractions, we see one of the earliest examples of students changing and shifting what they know about math. They started to learn about the number line, addition, and subtraction. As their math learning advances, they are introduced to the notion that the ways they add and subtract are different than with whole numbers, and this shifts students’ understanding of what numbers mean. Fraction Ball offers opportunities for students to adaptively monitor, plan, update, and shift thinking within reasoning about rational numbers in basketball games and strategies.

What sets Fraction Ball apart is its commitment to “embodied learning” – a pedagogical approach that connects physical movement with mathematical understanding. By integrating basketball-inspired games with rational number point values and visual representations on the court, students engage with mathematical concepts in a tangible way. Fraction Ball games and lessons also aim to improve students’ math-related emotions and teamwork through collaborative learning.

The results are promising. Studies have shown that students participating in Fraction Ball demonstrate significant improvements in their rational number understanding, including their ability to add fractions and decimals, translate between fractions and decimal representations, and place fractions and decimals on 0 to 1 and 0 to 5 number lines. These results suggest that Fraction Ball’s approach to supporting EF skill use within physically engaging and game-based activities is impactful for math learning.

The program’s impact extends beyond mathematical comprehension. Research has revealed a notable decrease in negative emotions related to math among participants, alongside improvements in student confidence and self-efficacy. The collaborative nature of the games also promotes teamwork and positive social interactions, creating a supportive learning environment.

One of the program’s exciting additional research findings is its success in achieving results in students’ far transfer – the ability of students to learn something with one set of numbers and use them with a new set of numbers. This is a challenge in math education and Fraction Ball is moving the needle on this.

 

The Impact of Inclusive Research & Development Processes

The development of Fraction Ball’s games, curriculum, and activities is driven by the team’s commitment to equity, leading to unique product developments and findings. The program has been shaped by deep partnerships with local educational organizations and institutions, and perhaps most importantly, through direct collaboration and co-design with students and teachers.

A striking example of this collaborative approach comes from a group of female students known as the Femineers. Seeking to improve accessibility, these students developed an indoor version of the game using bottle caps. This adaptation was incorporated into the full unit and contributed to improved far-transfer results in subsequent studies.

The program benefited from extensive cooperation with mathematics curriculum specialists, school principals, and educators to ensure alignment with district goals and practical implementation needs. This has led to several valuable adaptations, including:

– Curriculum guides that integrate with existing district scope and sequence

– Classroom activities complementing court-based learning

– Addition of a “Tracker” role for data analysis

– Grade-level differentiation to ensure challenging experiences for returning students

 

The Fraction Ball team is led by a diverse team of educators and scholars, including the majority of project team members as leaders of color. The team has a deep commitment to building the leadership capacity of graduate students, and educators they work with.

 

What’s Next?

Currently implemented in over 40 schools across four Southern California districts, Fraction Ball continues to expand its reach and impact. Ongoing evaluation studies, including a larger-scale randomized control trial (RCT) study, are being conducted to further validate the program’s effectiveness in improving fraction knowledge.

Through Juego (gojuego.com), the team is working to scale their playful learning model to reach more students and educators. Plans are also underway to expand the program’s content into surrounding grade levels through initiatives like Number Ball. The team also developed a Fraction Ball video game which offers educators valuable insights into their students’ fraction and executive function abilities through an assessment via gameplay features. This “stealth” assessment gathers data useful to researchers and educators, while avoiding testing burden on students or invoking test anxiety

As mathematics educators continue to seek innovative ways to engage students and improve learning outcomes, Fraction Ball stands as a shining example of how movement, play, and mathematical thinking can come together to create transformative educational experiences. By making mathematics not just accessible but genuinely enjoyable, Fraction Ball is helping to reshape students’ relationship with mathematical learning, one game at a time.

Despite their best efforts and persistent interventions, educators know that many older students still struggle to read and understand grade-level texts. A recent study suggests that many older students may be struggling with decoding, a crucial foundational literacy skill where readers identify and understand unknown words by breaking them down and sounding them out. The study by AERDF and ETS identified a “decoding threshold,” revealing that students in grades 3-12 who struggle with decoding also make slower progress in crucial reading skills like vocabulary, sentence processing, and comprehension.

This study calls us to reconsider how we approach both reading instruction and assessment for older students. Upper elementary and middle school teachers need foundational literacy assessments and resources that address more advanced decoding skills than what is typically covered in early elementary grades. However, because foundational literacy instruction and assessment typically ends by third grade, these educators are left without training or resources to identify the students who are struggling with these foundational skills. Additionally, many available comprehensive reading assessments for older readers require trained clinicians and are time-intensive, which further limits their use in schools with constrained resources.

Reading Reimagined, a program of AERDF, brought together partners from Stanford University Graduate School of Education and the Achievement Network (ANet) to test an assessment tool in schools that can help educators identify older students struggling to read. Their partnership has pioneered the implementation of an effective and efficient assessment tool that accurately measures reading skills in older students. We are excited to introduce the Stanford University Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR)!

Stanford’s ROAR tool is:

• Free: the assessment is available at no cost.
• Accessible: ROAR is a self-administered assessment that can be completed online by students within 15 minutes, without requiring extensive training or resources from teachers.
• Effective and research-backed: ROAR is one of two validated reading assessments for students across grades K-12. Research demonstrates its strong correlation with scores from traditional standardized reading tests, like the Woodcock-Johnson Letter Word Identification test, at a fraction of the time.
• Quick and efficient at scale: ROAR offers a fast and reliable way to assess students’ foundational literacy skills on a large scale, helping educators track reading ability and progress across grade levels.

Experience ROAR for yourself! Test out the individual assessments within the tool, and see how ROAR can benefit the learners in your life.

All students can be confident, successful readers with the proper support. The ROAR assessment can help identify the reading challenges older students face so educators and district leaders can plan for the support that most effectively aligns with their students’ needs. Reading Reimagined and its partners are taking a crucial first step to providing educators with resources that help learners on their journey to becoming proficient readers.

What happens when a high school student who struggles to read graduates? They are likely to become an adult who still struggles to read.

A recent article by the Hill emphasizes the detrimental impacts of illiteracy not just in childhood, but into adulthood and across generations: “Studies have shown that low literacy rates exacerbate everything from poverty and health care to low civic engagement.”

The lasting effects of illiteracy are too grave for us to continue as we have for decades. We must reevaluate the way we teach foundational literacy skills in the U.S. education system.

Traditionally, foundational literacy instruction is focused on grades Pre-K through third grade. That means even though teachers in upper elementary, middle and high school may notice their students struggling to comprehend grade-level texts, they are not trained or resourced to teach foundational literacy skills. They also have limited access to assessment tools that both identify the students who are struggling to read and pinpoint why.

There are many reasons why learners are struggling to read. One main reason is readers cannot sufficiently decode the increasingly complex words they encounter in middle and high school. Decoding is a foundational literacy skill where students break down and sound out novel words to understand them. In 2024, ETS and AERDF published a study that confirmed a decoding threshold: a critical level of decoding skills needed to read and understand grade-level texts. Older students with low decoding skills who fall below this threshold also tend to have low reading comprehension.

Whether you’re an educator, researcher, or policy maker, the implications of this study are far reaching and urge us to rethink how we address illiteracy in this country. AERDF’s program, Reading Reimagined, is investigating and co-designing solutions that will help end illiteracy, so all learners have the opportunity to be confident, proficient readers in school, at work, and beyond.

Read the article here.

As 2024 comes to a close, we at AERDF are proud to reflect on a year marked by promising breakthroughs and measurable progress toward discovering and advancing research-backed solutions to pressing challenges in PreK-12 education. As we chart a course for the year ahead, AERDF remains committed to advancing evidence-based solutions and cutting-edge interventions that boost learning outcomes, honor the perspectives of students and educators, and position all learners to thrive.

Our gratitude goes out to the powerful network of district partners, educators, and learners that makes our work possible. With your help this year, we were able to illuminate new science and technological breakthroughs and witness tangible, meaningful change in classrooms across the country. Together, we are pushing the boundaries of scientific possibilities in education to better serve learners and teachers everywhere.

Here are a few highlights from this pivotal year:

Uplifting Program Successes

AERDF programs operate on a five-year cycle to develop scientific insights, technical advancements, and prototypes that address major teaching and learning challenges and opportunities within their area of focus. Below is a snapshot of our program teams—each at a different point in their AERDF program lifecycle—and their recent successes.

 

Piloting Transformative Math Learning Approaches with EF+Math

Every student is a powerful learner capable of success in math. The innate assets they bring to the classroom–cultural wealth, lived experience, and executive function skills–need only be honored and activated to help them succeed. AERDF’s inaugural program, EF+Math, is proof of this. Their current three R&D teams, Fraction Ball, MathicSTEAM, and CueThinkEF+, are generating evidence-based solutions proving that creating math learning experiences that bring out the innate skills inside every student can improve math outcomes for all learners.

Earlier this year, the EF+Math team presented at the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). There, the teams shared how they are co-creating and implementing math learning breakthroughs, alongside educators, researchers, and developers, that allow students to showcase their assets in the math classroom. Watch the video and hear directly from researchers and educators about:

• CueThinkEF+’s AI-powered problem-solving and collaboration platform improving learners’ critical mathematical thinking skills
• Fraction Ball transforming basketball courts into interactive math games, teaching fractions through movement, significantly improving students’ understanding of rational numbers, and seeing higher overall accuracy scores
• MathicSTEAM co-designing curricular materials with educators and students to drive improvements in MIND Research’s neuroscience-based core K-6 curriculum called Insights Math and their development of a digital game-based app that provides opportunities to deepen students’ math fact fluency while simultaneously strengthening their executive function skills, like working memory.

 

 

Charting a Course for More Meaningful Assessment with Assessment For Good

A student’s learning experience is about more than just mastering subject content. It also involves building confidence, self-awareness, and motivation as they encounter exciting and challenging opportunities in the classroom, at home, and in their communities. AERDF’s program, Assessment for Good (AFG), has identified 30 key skills that maximize growth and learning in the classroom and beyond. AFG is designing and testing assessment prototypes that measure the skills that enhance learning for all students, everywhere learning happens. 

In a recent webinar with EdSurge, Dr. Temple Lovelace—Program Executive Director of AFG—shared the program’s vision for assessment that captures student learning as it’s happening. With this approach, we can measure the skills students use to learn–like perseverance and confidence–as well as the content they’re learning. Learn how AFG, alongside learners, caregivers, and educators, is working to make such assessment tools possible.

 

 

Driving Literacy Forward with Reading Reimagined

AERDF’s program, Reading Reimagined—now nearing its midway point—recently unveiled groundbreaking research in partnership with ETS to shed light on why many older students are struggling to read. The study underlines the importance of decoding—a crucial foundational literacy skill where readers identify and understand unknown words by breaking them down and sounding them out. Students who lack this critical skill fall below the “decoding threshold”—and show slower progress in vocabulary, sentence processing, and comprehension. 

 

These findings underscore the urgent need for programs like Reading Reimagined that develop breakthrough, classroom-tested approaches to support struggling readers of all ages. In an August 2024 New York Times article, Program Executive Director Rebecca Kockler gave her perspective on how the national movement to rethink reading has largely left out a generation of older students who are behind in literacy—and who will not recover without extra help.

 

Dare to Dream: The AERDF AdvancED Fellowship to Prove the Impossible

In April 2024, AERDF launched a nationwide search for the next big idea with the power to transform how all children learn. Out of nearly 1,000 incredible applicants, a select group of fellows were invited to participate in our AdvancED Fellowship—uniting visionary leaders across disciplines to hone their ideas with the support of experts across learning science, development, technology, educator practice, policy, and more. We look forward to sharing what we learned about the state of the art in education through this fellowship.

Stay tuned for the launch of AERDF’s next program and news of the talented executive director who will pursue courageous and ambitious solutions that produce transformative outcomes for all learners.

 

Scaling AERDF’s Influence at the National Level

In addition to being selected as one of Fast Company’s 2024 World Changing Ideas, AERDF was honored to present at some of the nation’s most prestigious education and innovation events this past year—including ASU+GSV Summit 2024, ISTELive 2024, NCTM, and AERA Annual Meeting 2024. We are excited to continue bringing this essential work to the forefront of national conversations about innovation and impact in education.

Relive our time at ISTELive:

 

As we enter 2025, we’re ready to build on this year’s momentum, deepening our commitment to advancing education solutions that are both transformative and inclusive of learner and teacher perspectives. Together, we will continue to innovate, collaborate, and create opportunities for every learner to thrive.

 

It’s a well-worn adage in education that students first learn to read, and then read to learn.

At some point, usually around 3rd grade, school systems assume that children have the basics down. They start requiring kids to read increasingly complex text across subject areas. But new research shows that many older students lack critical foundational skills, limiting how far they can progress in their reading abilities as the volume and variety of text grows steeper.

The study from researchers at ETS, a testing organization, and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, a group that creates research programs to support Black, Latino, and low-income students, confirms the idea of a “decoding threshold”—a baseline ability to sound out words that students need in order to make good progress on other literacy skills.

Kids who don’t meet this threshold see slower growth in their reading ability than their peers, the researchers found, which can lead to compounding gaps over time.

Read the rest of the article.

Assessments have the power to shape educational outcomes, but are we truly measuring what matters? Ensuring that assessments are fair, inclusive and meaningful for all students is a growing priority for educators. Bias, whether systemic or unintentional, can affect accuracy, disadvantaging students from diverse backgrounds. This requires a critical look at both what and how we assess, ensuring the most important skills and knowledge are prioritized.

Recently, EdSurge webinar host Matthew Joseph discussed with education experts the need for assessments to measure what truly matters and power human progress. Webinar panelists included Patrick Kyllonen from ETS, Candace Thille from Stanford Graduate School of Education, Eugene So from JFFLabs and Temple Lovelace from Assessment for Good, a program with the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.

Read and watch the webinar here.

Early and targeted interventions are critical in helping these students understand increasingly complex tests, a study finds. Struggling readers in upper elementary grades and beyond can benefit from decoding instruction to help boost their reading proficiency, including comprehension skills, according to a study released Wednesday by two education research organizations.

Without foundational word recognition skills, it can be difficult for struggling older readers to improve their comprehension of grade-level texts, the study by the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund and the Educational Testing Service found.

While basic phonics lessons are crucial in early elementary grades, older students may need continued support with decoding skills as texts get more technical, abstract and complex, said Rebecca Sutherland, co-author of the study and an associate director of research for AERDF’s Reading Reimagined program. AERDF is a nonprofit research and development organization focused on pre-K–12 education.

Early and targeted interventions are critical for helping upper elementary and middle school students understand texts that have increasingly complicated sentences and multisyllabic words, said Sutherland.

Read the rest of the article.

To comprehend what they’re reading, many middle and high school students still need decoding support, researchers say. New research shows older students like C.J. hit a “decoding threshold.” Over 20% of students in fifth through seventh grade stumble over words they don’t recognize or can’t sound out, often preventing them from grasping the main idea of reading materials for school, according to the study released Wednesday from the Educational Testing Service and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.

Falling literacy rates following the pandemic have drawn more attention to adolescents’ reading proficiency. National tests from 2022 showed alarming declines in eighth graders’ reading skills.

But experts have long recognized that many older students lack a strong foundation in reading. “A lot of kids could very well have their basic K-2 foundational skills down pat, but they still need decoding support,” said Rebecca Sutherland, a co-author of the report and the associate director of research for Reading Reimagined, a project of the research and development fund. “There’s an assumption … that kids can self-teach.”

Read the rest of the article.