Students rarely practice math outside of school requirements, which we refer to as the “math-practice gap”. This gap might be the reason why students struggle with math, making it urgent to develop means by which to address it. In the current paper, we propose that math apps offer a viable solution to the math-practice gap: Online apps can provide access to a large number of problems, tied to immediate feedback, and delivered in an engaging way. To substantiate this conversation, we looked at whether tablets are sufficiently engaging to motivate children’s informal math practice. Our approach was to partner with education agencies via a community-based participatory research design. The three participating education agencies serve elementary-school students from low-SES communities, allowing us to look at tablet use by children who are unlikely to have extensive access to online math enrichment programs. At the same time, the agencies differed in several structural details, including whether our intervention took place during school time, after school, or during the summer. This allowed us to shed light on tablet feasibility under different organizational constraints. Our findings show that tablet-based math practice is engaging for young children, independent of the setting, the student’s age, or the math concept that was tackled. At the same time, we found that student engagement was a function of the presence of caring adults to facilitate their online math practice.
Important strides have been made in the science of learning to read. Yet, many students still struggle to attain reading proficiency. This calls for sustained efforts to bridge theoretical insights with applied considerations about ideal pedagogy. The current study was designed to contribute to this conversation, namely by looking at the efficacy of an online reading program. The chosen reading program, referred to as MindPlay Virtual Reading Coach (MVRC), emphasizes the mastery of basic reading skills to support the development of reading fluency. Its focus on basic skills diverges from the goal of increasing reading motivation. And its focus on reading fluency, vs. broad literacy achievement, offers an alternative to already existing reading enrichment. In order to test the efficacy of MVRC, we recruited three school districts. One district provided data from elementary schools that used the MVRC program in Grades 2 to 6 (N = 2,531 total). The other two districts participated in a quasi-experimental design: Six 2nd-grade classrooms and nine 4th-grade classrooms were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) instruction as usual, (2) instruction with an alternative online reading program, and (3) instruction with MVRC. Complete data sets were available from 142 2nd-graders and 172 4th-graders. Three assessments from the MVRC screener were used: They assessed reading fluency, phonic skills, and listening vocabulary at two time points: before and after the intervention. Results show a clear advantage of MVRC on reading fluency, more so than on phonics or listening vocabulary. At the same time, teachers reported concerns with MVRC, highlighting the challenge with reading programs that emphasize basic-skills mastery over programs that seek to encourage reading.
In the current study, we explored math anxiety in the context of a special kind of math practice, one that allowed for some flexibility on the part of the students. Such student-guided math practice is conducive to exploring how math anxiety relates to children’s day-to-day experiences with math, potentially yielding insights into math anxiety that would not be available otherwise. Students in Grades 3 and 4 (N = 26) could choose math problems that were below, at, or above their proficiency level. They also completed a math-anxiety survey and an emotional self-efficacy survey. Descriptive results revealed that math anxiety was implicated in two negative outcomes of math practice: children’s tendency to avoid challenging math problems and children’s relatively low success rate when working on class-level math. Finding that math anxiety relates to several negative experiences could explain why math anxiety can persist. Importantly, results show that emotional self-efficacy plays a role in both children’s willingness to challenge themselves and their success rate. This adds to the ongoing discussion on whether emotional self-efficacy can compensate for the negative effects of math anxiety.
IntroductionMath achievement for economically disadvantaged students remains low, despite positive developments in research, pedagogy, and funding. In the current paper, we focused on the research-to-practice divide as possible culprit. Our argument is that urban-poverty schools lack the stability that is necessary to deploy the trusted methodology of hypothesis-testing. Thus, a type of efficacy methodology is needed that could accommodate instability.MethodWe explore the details of such a methodology, building on already existing emancipatory methodologies. Central to the proposed solution-based research (SBR) is a commitment to the learning of participating students. This commitment is supplemented with a strength-and-weaknesses analysis to curtail researcher bias. And it is supplemented with an analysis of idiosyncratic factors to determine generalizability. As proof of concept, we tried out SBR to test the efficacy of an afterschool math program.ResultsWe found the SBR produced insights about learning opportunities and barrier that would not be known otherwise. At the same time, we found that hypothesis-testing remains superior in establishing generalizability.DiscussionOur findings call for further work on how to establish generalizability in inherently unstable settings.
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