Used in 18 southern California schools, the program has led to improvements in students’ rational number understanding and executive functioning skills.

Lourdes Acevedo-Farag helped create Fraction Ball in 2018, when, through lucky timing, the charter school where she taught middle school math — El Sol Science and Arts Academy of Santa Ana — had not yet painted lines on the school’s outdoor basketball court.

Working with researchers at University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, as well as other teachers at the school, Acevedo-Farag began developing Fraction Ball as a way to help her students better understand fractions and decimals in relation to whole numbers.″​​We know that rational numbers are really like the gatekeeper to algebra,” said Acevedo-Farag, who has since left the classroom to pursue a Ph.D in education at UC Irvine.

Megan Brunner, associate director of research and learning at Advanced Education Research and Development Fund’s EF+Math Program, said there is research showing that when students have stronger executive functioning skills, achievement gaps decrease for historically underserved students.

The work to understand equity-centered educational experiences through math instruction and executive functioning skill-building is “really about helping students be agents over their own learning… and moving away from some of the historically kind of deficit thinking around executive functions,” Brunner said.

Acevedo-Farag added that for Fraction Ball specifically, participating students can strengthen their cognitive, physical, executive functioning, listening and collaboration skills — all while playing a fun game.

“As a teacher of 12 years, I saw we either are teaching executive functioning skills, or we’re teaching math, and Fraction Ball is the first time I saw that we’re doing it together. And it’s working,” she said.

Read the rest of the story here.

Learn how we gathered a passionate community of experts committed to reshaping education over the next 10 to 20 years. They became the AERDF Community Garden. Using AERDF’s Advanced Inclusive R&D process, we uncovered research opportunities connected to three focus areas that affect educational inequity: income inequality, sustainable teaching, and student-centered learning. This report explains the process we used to identify fundable initiatives and includes six example Opportunity Studies.

Read the Report

Tom Vander Ark was recently at ISTE 2024 where he got the chance to sit down with Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF). Auditi had just finished leading a session at ISTE, which focused on K-12 demand for evidence of the EdTech lifecycle, including evaluation, implementation, and outcomes.

This conversation came on the heels of writing Unfulfilled Promise: The Forty-Year Shift From Print to Digital and Why It Failed to Transform Learning for the Hoover Institute. This paper addressed many of the points mentioned in a recent study that found that school districts accessed an average of 2,591 edtech tools and students and educators both averaged about 42 tools in the 2022 to 2023 school year.

This number was then complicated by the fact that the number of unique digital solutions accessed by educators decreased by more than 14% over the year prior – highlighting that educators may be starting to feel “tech fatigue.”Tom sat down with Auditi live at ISTE to discuss what’s next for EdTech.

Read the article here.

The NWEA results show achievement gaps continuing to widen. For example, Asian students are showing some growth, but made fewer gains in math last year than during the pre-COVID years. White, Black and Hispanic students, however, continue to lose ground. In both elementary and middle school, Hispanic students need the most additional instruction to reach pre-COVID levels, the data shows.

In reading, the gap between pre-pandemic growth and current trends widened by an average of 36%, compared with 18% in math. It’s possible, Karyn Lewis, director of research and policy partnerships for NWEA added, that districts focused extra recovery efforts on math because initial data on learning loss showed those declines to be the most severe.

But that’s left many students without the reading skills to tackle harder books and vocabulary as they move into high school, said Rebecca Kockler, who leads Reading Reimagined, a project of the nonprofit Advanced Education Research and Development Fund. The organization is funding research to find which literacy strategies work with adolescents, who are easily turned off by books intended for young kids. The pandemic, she said, only exacerbated a longstanding literacy problem for older students.

“About 30% of American high schoolers for 30 years have been proficient readers, and that really hasn’t changed,” said Kockler, a former Louisiana assistant superintendent who oversaw a redesign of the state’s reading program. “It’s always the hardest to move middle school reading results, and even some of the success we would see in fourth grade didn’t always carry up into middle school.”

Read the article here.

In a interview leading up to ISTELive 24, AERDF CEO discusses R&D strategies for new learning techniques and speaks about the AERDF’s approach to integrating educators, researchers, and product developers to ensure tools used in PreK-12 classrooms work by providing scientific evidence of improved student learning outcomes.

Listen in here

Over the past 14 months we at AERDF have been fortunate to be able to work with so many visionary education professionals, researchers and leaders at AERDF, and yet one among them stands out for her uniquely important role in our work. Please join us in celebrating the significant contributions of educational neuroscientist Dr. Melina Uncapher, co-founder of AERDF and founder of EF+Math. This year Melina transitioned from her full-time role in our organization, concluding a six-year tenure marked by tremendous achievements. 

 

Melina’s imprint on this organization’s story runs deep and predates our founding. Prior to AERDF’s public launch, in 2018, we began to seek solutions to persistent education challenges by gathering insights through a Request for Information, focus groups, surveys and listening tour with education leaders. Many ideas were submitted covering a broad range of subject areas. That call to the education sector led to the launch of EF+Math, founded by Melina and co-built and now led by Dr. Aubrey Francisco. EF+Math’s launch proved the viability of an Advanced Inclusive R&D model that paved the way for a launch of AERDF and ultimately, Assessment for Good and Reading Reimagined.

 

The EF+Math team established the initial foundation for AERDF while also pursuing their breakthrough goal to dramatically improve mathematics learning by embedding in math instruction the strengthening of executive function (or “EF”) skills. With AERDF’s launch, Melina was named Chief of Research and Development, a role through which she helped pioneer the application of R&D, already a powerful “engine of innovation” in other sectors, to the PreK-12 sector.

 

Among Melina’s many contributions to AERDF was creation of a framework to understand how our R&D projects progress from basic research to advanced application at scale. She also brought in new thinking around how to improve collaboration across traditionally rigid boundaries experienced by educators, researchers, and developers, which we now call “Inclusive R&D.” Additionally, Melina built a robust infrastructure that provides our programs the scientific, engineering, and policy support to accomplish our bold goals; this includes a highly secure technical infrastructure, legal and ethics support, scientific and technical reviews, data management plan development, and general research and evaluation support to strengthen equitable approaches to R&D. We are excited to share that these foundational services will now be available outside of AERDF through a new organization called SETA-ED (Scientific and Engineering Technical Assistance for Education). SETA-ED operates independently from AERDF to bring the lessons learned in our 5 years conducting Advanced Inclusive R&D to strengthen the broader education R&D ecosystem.

 

“I’ve learned a lot from Melina in the time we’ve been able to work together.” Auditi Chakravarty, CEO of AERDF, reflects “One of the frequent sayings I will carry from her is the advice from now Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director Arati Prabhakar that a great Program Executive Director should have their  ‘head in the cloud and boots on the ground.’ This continues to serve as a powerful motto for our program leaders as they pursue their bold breakthroughs. I thank Melina for that and other indelible contributions to this organization as we continue to innovate and apply Inclusive R&D to transform learning experiences for Black and Latino learners and learners experiencing poverty. I asked Melina to sum up what she was most proud of during her time at AERDF and very fittingly she spoke to what could be possible for the future of PreK-12 education if we dared to dream big.”

 

Melina shared “As a field we’ve come together to think and do things we couldn’t have imagined before AERDF. We’ve been inspired by what is most important–the brilliance and potential of every learner–and we’ve built new ways of revealing that brilliance using science and engineering, but also heart and soul. I hope that in 10 years, every young learner in the US will be positively impacted by the work AERDF is up to.”

 

Melina’s new organization, SETA-ED, will operate as a scientific and engineering technical assistance (SETA) provider, which is a familiar model in other Advanced R&D sectors that provides on-demand expertise and robust infrastructure services to reduce start-up friction, amplifying R&D teams’ expertise and impact by helping them envision, plan, execute and scale their R&D efforts. This SETA continues to support AERDF, and now extends its support to the  education R&D sector, particularly in the face of pervasive PreK-12 teaching and learning challenges exacerbated by the pandemic. More information can be found by contacting info@seta-ed.com or visiting http://seta-ed.com.

 

We look forward to continued partnership with Melina in her new capacity and are excited for the many ways the R&D ecosystem is poised to benefit from her leadership. Please join us in congratulating Melina for her incredible service to AERDF!

Students, teachers, and schools are in urgent need of bold, rigorous mathematics learning approaches that are developed and tested in real classrooms—and are proven to get results. EF+Math is hard at work developing such learning approaches and has reached a significant moment in our program. We are excited to share what the research & development project teams (“project teams”) in the EF+Math portfolio have learned and announce which teams will continue into the next two years of our program to continue the development of their promising math learning approaches and conduct evaluations in collaboration with our independent evaluator.

At EF+Math, we are working to understand the promise of mathematics learning approaches in grades 3–8 that combine executive function (EF) skills, conceptual understanding and multi-step problem solving, and equity. We are launching this blog series to share what we are learning about how equity-centered education experiences, based on learning science, and co-designed by educators, researchers, and developers, can dramatically improve mathematics outcomes for Black and Latinx students and all students experiencing poverty.

Our funded EF+Math project teams base their work and hypothesis on existing research and a strengths-based approach that assumes that students from all backgrounds are equally capable of success in mathematics and focuses on the foundational skills that all students have and that underlie learning: specifically, the ability to hold and work with information in one’s mind, the ability to focus attention on what a student deems important and ignore what she deems unimportant, and to be flexible in her thinking. These abilities are referred to as ‘executive functions,’ and are essential assets every student possesses. Executive functions allow students to have agency over their attention, emotions, and behavior to achieve the learning goals they set for themselves.

By examining the intersection of mathematics, executive function, and equity, we are deepening our understanding of what happens when students have opportunities to develop their math-relevant executive function skills. We build more equitable opportunities for students to develop agency and to use that agency to learn anything. We view executive function skills as a path to student agency, such that students can direct their executive function skills toward learning what they deem important to learn.

This blog series will share learnings and profile the project teams continuing to advance their math learning approaches through EF+Math. Our work builds on existing research which demonstrates that because there are no inherent differences in abilities in students from different races/ethnicities or household income levels, observed performance differences are instead likely driven by differences in opportunities to build math abilities given to students from different races/ethnicities or household income levels. We see students of color and students experiencing poverty are not often offered challenging math learning experiences or opportunities to problem solve and reason, both of which are paramount for student learning (e.g., Chunn, 1989; Oakes, 1995; Sorhagen, 2013). Thus, a core and yet addressable issue in mathematics education is the need to reduce inequalities between students’ opportunities to learn and to be given opportunities to be challenged in mathematics. We support project teams that tackle these challenges head-on and aim to provide opportunities for all students to develop their EF skills to learn challenging math. Our portfolio of advancing project teams is well-poised to continue developing math learning approaches which will advance our understanding of these relationships, evaluate what can positively impact student math learning outcomes, and take those that can to sustainably scale their impact.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF EF+MATH ADVANCING PROJECT TEAMS

Throughout Phases 1-3 of EF+Math’s work, we engaged with project teams regularly to understand their progress towards carefully defined prototype and research milestones, and actively directed the work not only towards individual project goals but also towards our overall program goals – bringing our EF+Math team’s perspectives from and expertise in engineering, research, evaluation, and practice.

In Phases 4-5, we will narrow our focus and collaboration to a smaller set of projects. And we will continue to actively direct the work, bringing into this collaborative inclusive R&D effort our evaluation partners at AIR to lead innovative, iterative, inclusive, and equitable evaluation studies. These studies will allow for both continued R&D of prototypes while also gathering stronger evidence of impact on math outcomes and explanatory evidence on the role of EF and student equity experiences. Going forward, this will be a collective effort across our EF+Math program team, AIR, the advancing R&D project teams, and our district partners to reach our program goals.

We are pleased to announce the three project teams continuing as part of EF+Math’s portfolio:

• Fraction Ball:
  • A series of movement-based games that make meaningful connections between math learning in the classroom and the schoolyard and provide a playful context for students to engage in embodied rational number learning while strengthening executive function skills (grades 4-5).

 

• CueThinkEF+ with Pennesota:
• • A web-based learning system for facilitating collaborative mathematical discourse and problem-solving with embedded executive function scaffolds to create safe spaces for historically marginalized students to express their ideas and share their thinking and reasonings (grades 6-8).

 

• MathicSTEAM:
  • An individualized app that combines math fact fluency with executive function skill training through games, offering adaptive pathways and responsive feedback that honors students’ strengths and supports productive struggle (grades 4-5).

 

The power of this combination of project teams is in (a) the critically important mathematics being targeted by each of the three teams and (b) the different mechanistic approaches they are taking in the design and study of their learning approaches that allow us to maximize our understanding of the role of EFs and equity in mathematics learning. Through multiple rounds of R&D in their first three years of work, these project teams tested their approaches for improving math learning, strengthening and/or supporting EF skills, and also investigated specific hypotheses on the relationships between EF skills and critically important facets of mathematical proficiency. Importantly, they each demonstrated early evidence of the promise of these approaches, an ability to develop and maintain strong district relationships, and simultaneously develop tools and resources for real-world classrooms while generating generalizable knowledge in a truly inclusive and equity-centered way. In future pieces, we will provide more in-depth profiles of each continuing project team. We are excited about each team’s work and the combined collective potential of the total portfolio.

 

OUR LEARNINGS IN PHASES 1-3

We arrived at our advancement decisions through three years of Inclusive Research and Development and project team progress. Our Insights Report shared findings from the first two years of research and development earlier this year, but our work continues to build on our body of evidence toward impact for Black and Latinx students, and all students experiencing poverty. We aim to highlight some of the exciting work that is continuing to come out of our program.

• Our project teams found improvements in student mathematics and executive functioning skills through participating in the programThe Fraction Ball team showed that students who participated in their approach to fraction learning through movement improved on math assessments compared to students who did not participate (Bustamante, et al., 2022). The most recent version of their approach built on their previous research findings to improve students’ reasoning when using multiple denominators.Further, the MathicSTEAM team found that along with improvements on math scores, students demonstrated improvements on executive function tasks in a math context. These tasks involved flexible thinking, classifying objects into categories, using their working memory, and strengthening their sustained attention.

• Our teams explored the relationships between mathematical identity and belonging for students and their engagement and achievement in math class, finding new ways to incorporate cultural relevance into math learning materials:

The Our Mathematical World team’s approach includes storybooks for 3rd – 5th graders where diverse characters engage with mathematics throughout their everyday lives. After reading the books, students reported that they related to the book characters and could see multiple ways of solving problems represented, which made them feel more comfortable in solving problems themselves (Hornburg, et al., 2023)

• We are learning more about prototype features and effective teaching moves that support how students engage their executive function skills.

Students working within the CueThinkEF+ platform may receive different pop-up messages providing prompts and scaffolds throughout their problem-solving process, based on the team’s research on the role of metacognition and EFs in problem-solving success (Rhodes, et al., 2023).

Another project, Mathematical Thinkers Like Me, found that when students are provided opportunities to work in groups on non-routine tasks, different stages of the problem-solving process may require the use of different executive function skills. Collaboration in problem-solving is associated with strengthened executive function skills, which generates implications for how collaboration is structured and scaffolded during learning (Renninger, et al., 2023).

The Spark Math team’s approach involves several games that recruit executive functions as students play; they worked to define what executive functions look like and sound like in use during these games (Zengilowski, et al., 2023)

These examples showcase that students can benefit from learning about what EFs are, and how they show up in math learning environments. Further, if teachers can understand how executive functions show up in classroom activity, they can notice when and how students are engaging, and provide more targeted support for learning.

While the research findings thus far are promising and exciting, they also serve tangible purposes in informing the next phases of iterative, equitable, and inclusive research and development. The FractionBall, CueThinkEF+, and MathicSTEAM teams will continue to iterate on their approaches while also engaging in larger evaluation studies with our partners from the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

We are proud of the work our entire portfolio and EF+Math community accomplished over the last several years and are optimistic that what emerges from our next phases of work will have the ability to significantly impact students in becoming proficient in math and seeing themselves as mathematicians. Stay tuned for the next blog in our series.

REFERENCES

Bustamante, A. S., Begolli, K. N., Alvarez-Vargas, D., Bailey, D. H., & Richland, L. E. (2022). Fraction ball: Playful and physically active fraction and decimal learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(6), 1307–1320. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000714v

Chunn, E.W. (1989). Sorting black students for success and failure: The inequity of ability grouping and tracking. In W.D. Smith & E.W. Chunn (Eds.), Black education: A quest for equity and excellence. Routledge

Hornburg, C. B., Mayes, A. S., McElveen, T. L., Powell, S. R., Melzi, G., Prishker, N., Asad, N., Valdivia, I., Andres-Salgarino, M. B., Tran, L. M., Eiland, M. D., Eason, S. H., Schmitt, S. A., & Purpura, D. J. (2023, November). The development of storybooks supporting elementary students’ math identity, executive function, and word problem solving [Poster presentation]. Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Reno, NV.

Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality. Yale University Press.

Renninger, K. A., Boehim, R., De Dios, M. C., Hogan, M.R., Kyaw, M. H., Michels, A.G., Nakayama, M., Torres, P.E., & Werneck de Souza Dias, H. (2023, August). Exploring collaboration and executive functions in open-ended problem-solving in mathematics [Paper presentation]. The 20th Biennial EARLI Conference for Research on Learning and Instruction, Thessaloniki, Greece. https://www.earli.org/assets/files/EARLI2023-BOA-280823.pdf

Rhodes, S., Bryck, R., Gutierrez de Blume, A. (2023). Exploring factors influencing success in mathematical problem solving. In T. Lamberg & D. Moss (Eds.), Proceedings of the forty-fifth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 2) (pp.95-105). University of Nevada, Reno.

Sorhagen, N. S. (2013). Early teacher expectations disproportionately affect poor children’s high school performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 465-477.

Zengilowski, A., Geng, J., Boudaie, S., Katz, B., Shah, P., & Munakata, Y. (2023, August). Making math fun: Developing executive function strategies and math-positivity through gameplay [Poster presentation]. Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.

“We think about 40 to 50 percent of middle and high school students in America cannot perform this skill at the rate they need in order to be able to access reading comprehension,” said Kockler.

In this Education Week article, Rebecca Kockler, executive director of AERDF’s Reading Reimagined, draws the connection between students with insufficient decoding skills and poor reading comprehension, a problem she says researchers are discovering is much broader than previously thought.

She points to a landmark 2019 study that analyzed more than 30,000 students in 5th through 10th grade and found that those who scored below the ‘“decoding threshold”—meaning they were unable to decode grade-level text automatically, with accuracy and efficiency—made no significant growth in their reading comprehension ability over the next three years.

The first step to helping older students who are struggling to read is to diagnose the problem correctly, says Kockler, who recommends using an assessment specifically validated for older students, such as the Stanford University free tool Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) developed by Dr. Jason Yeatman and his team.

Read the rest of the article to learn more

The news about American students’ reading abilities isn’t good: For far too long, our education system has failed to teach many children to become proficient readers. Recently, there has been a lot of focus on learning losses experienced by students of all ages during the pandemic — including, unfortunately, in reading. Less than one-third of all students scored at Proficient or above on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment. But our struggles to effectively teach all students to read didn’t start in March 2020; they were evident long before then. For example, decades of assessment data shows that, fewer eighth graders demonstrate grade-level reading proficiency on tests like the NAEP than do fourth graders, even though eighth graders have had four more years of schooling than fourth graders have. 

 

A lot happens between fourth grade and eighth grade, but one thing students rarely receive during those years is explicit instruction in foundational literacy skills. Why does explicit instruction in reading stop after third grade? Conventional wisdom holds that, once students have mastered basics like phonics, which focuses on decoding one- and two-syllable words, they know “how” to read and need little or no further support to be able to decode more complex words. After third grade, instruction generally shifts to support students’ higher-order reading skills, like fluency and comprehension.

 

People often blame smartphones and other digital distractions as the reason why so many kids today aren’t good readers. But the low reading proficiency rates of middle school students predate the advent of the smartphone, so the answer must lie elsewhere. An often-overlooked culprit may be the increasing demands placed on older students’ foundational literacy skills once they must independently read and comprehend complicated, discipline-specific texts: Students in upper elementary and middle school often encounter texts that feature sentences with more complicated syntax than those used in early elementary texts or in their everyday speech. These more complicated texts are loaded with words derived from other languages, like Latin and Greek, which have different spelling conventions than the words students learned in their basic phonics lessons. Older students must also draw on their implicit knowledge of morphology (e.g., recognizing the relationship between words like “merry” and “merriment”). A student whose foundational literacy skills allowed her to read third grade texts proficiently might struggle in sixth or seventh grade to decode abstract, multisyllabic words like “tenacious,” “inclination,” or “xeriscape.”

 

The widespread belief that the basic decoding skills students have acquired by the end of third grade will provide a sufficient foundation for their future reading growth may actually be undermining our efforts to move the needle on older students’ literacy. Complex decoding challenges are hiding in plain sight and can block older readers from comprehending grade-level texts.

 

In 2019, a team of researchers at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) published groundbreaking research that drew on an unusual dataset measuring the foundational literacy skills of students in upper elementary, middle, and high school. Assessments designed to test older students’ reading abilities almost always measure comprehension alone; they do not provide any information about students’ foundational skills, like decoding. By using this unique dataset, the ETS team was able to examine the relationship between older students’ decoding skills and their reading comprehension, and the team discovered a decoding threshold: Older students with low decoding skills had consistently low reading comprehension scores, while the students whose decoding scores were above a threshold value had much better comprehension scores. This phenomenon reveals that, while decoding skills alone are no silver bullet to address all older students’ literacy learning needs, the students whose decoding skills are not yet strong enough to read complex text accurately and efficiently will struggle to comprehend that complex text. 

The relationship between decoding ability and comprehension at any age might seem obvious, but it has largely been missing from conversations about supporting older students’ literacy development. It’s hard to talk about something we cannot see or describe; without accurate diagnostic information about older students’ foundational skills, their teachers quite literally cannot know how to support them. The good news is that there is a path forward: Schools can now easily adopt validated screening assessments — e.g., tests like ROAR or Capti Assess — to measure foundational literacy skills among older students. Widespread use of a screening test will enable educators to identify the students who need continued instructional support in foundational literacy skills. Meanwhile, Reading Reimagined, a program by the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), is partnering with researchers to develop both assessment and instructional solutions that will allow teachers to support their older students to cross the decoding threshold, so they can focus on comprehending what they read. Having actionable data is, of course, just the first step to ending the literacy crisis, but every successful journey begins with a first step.

 

By Rebecca Kockler, Executive Director, Reading Reimagined, and Rebecca Sutherland, Associate Director of Research, Reading Reimagined. Reading Reimagined is a program by the Advanced Education Research & Development Fund (AERDF).