EducationNews.org

Funny, I have never seen a positive review of EM by students or parents.  From what I understand (from our own district's school board), EM is expensive to implement and complicated to teach in that teachers not only have to be trained in how to teach the program, they also have to be sure and supplement with math facts practice and introduce traditional algorithms (on their own, of course) so that students will test well on those state tests.  Who has time for that?  I do know parents who have had experience with EM and their experience was frustrating, to put it mildly.  Who cares what such and such study says?  Who cares that some organization called the What Works Clearinghouse said EM has a "potentially positive effect" - what does that mean to parents who are struggling to help their struggling children with elementary math?  Some parents might not have access to online materials.  Some children might not have parents who care about whether they know math or not.  It's silly and a waste of precious taxpayer dollars.

Our school district gave this answer (provided by Mr. Isaacs?) to the question “What does the research say about spiraling?”  “While continued research involving ‘spiraling’ needs to be conducted, a body of studies does exist, such as the work of Doug Rohrer of the University of Florida, offering evidence supporting the advantages of the distributed practice (spiral review) pedagogy.”

 

“Distributed practice” means distributing practice of what has been  learned.  According to Rohrer, it is critical for math students to reach some mastery before moving on. 

 

For most math students, this is the antithesis of Mr. Isaacs’ learning “best when new topics are presented at a brisk pace with multiple exposures over time” spiral model.  Everyday Math isn’t coy about it: “as usual in Everyday Mathematics, proficiency is expected only after multiple exposures over several years.”   http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/about/research/algorithms.pdf (page 6).

 

What text book does Rohrer cite in his study that puts “distributed practice” to good use?  Saxon.

 

Study summary: http://uweb.cas.usf.edu/~drohrer/pdfs/Rohrer&Taylor2006ACPsummary.pdf

 

 

 

Message

By the age of 15 my three homeschoolers finished Calculus III at the community college. The two younger children earned B.S. degrees in math at our flagship state university at the age of 18.

We used Saxon Math.

You may contact me if you wish.  If you have any questions or are curious about how we achieved this level of mastery in math, my e-mail is: ejdds@xmission.com

Even though my children were in the local news papers, and the university did a full page article on the "youngest students on campus" , an educator has NEVER contacted our family to ask about our methods. I find this curious, for it says much about the "scientific" curiosity of those in education. In the hard sciences and in industry when outstanding achievement and success is encountered researchers are all over it like flies on honey. Yet...No educator has ever been curious about the academic success of my children.

I would think that to duplicate academic success then successful children should be studied in depth.  Some questions to ask would be:

How much are the parents doing?

What "afterschooling" is the child doing independently at home?

What is their curriculum?

Just exactly how much is being learned in the classroom? ( Possibly, little or nothing.)  

How much is **entirely** due to the child and parents' independent efforts at home?

Are the parents and child essentially entirely homeschooling ( afterschooling) at home?

In my anecdotal experience, the home lives, and home study habits of academically successful children institutionalized for their education matches identically the home habits of our homeschool family. Perhaps the academically successful institutionalized child is successful precisely because he and his parent are AFTERSCHOOLING ( homeschooling after school)!

If the only thing that institutional schools do well is to send home a curriculum for parents and children to follow ( this is: "afterschooling") then two things must happen:

1) That curriculum should be  complete, comprehensive, and entirely understandable by the parent and the child.

2) For disadvantaged children, an institutional school program that attempts to duplicate a successful academic home life is the their **only** hope.  KIPP schools are having success doing this. George Will calls them "paternalistic" schools.

Finally, **ALL**elementary and high school teachers should pass with at least a "B" college level calculus for engineers and scientists. They should sit shoulder to shoulder with engineering and science students in the **same** calculus classes.  Doing this would help assure three things:

1) They had the IQ to justify their salary. ( Education majors have some of the lowest SAT and GRE scores on campus.)

2) They had an appreciation for and ability in math. 

3) Teachers on all levels would communicate a love of math instead a fear for the subject.

By the way....I will be **astonished** if you contact me. No educator ever has.

An e-mail link is included in the body of my letter to Dr. Isaacs. I wil be amazed if he contacts me. No educator has ever show the slight interest.

"program’s research basis"

How much of this is vaild research?

"Everyday Math’s Grade-Level Goals very clearly define the skills and concepts students are expected to master every year. "

This just doesn't happen. You can't blame teacher training or the students. If you allow mastery of skills to slide, they won't just magically fix themselves at the end of the year. There are too many kids on too many different pages. Just because EM says that something should happen doesn't mean that it can or will happen.

"Everyday Mathematics is an effective, research-based, and research-validated program that provides what our students need today for success tomorrow."

And still, you didn't address all of the very specific criticisms raised in this thread. You just wanted to wait until the thread died down and then add in your final comments.

Reality is not what's on your web site or in your workbooks. Reality is what happens in the average classroom. EM can't throw anything they want into their curriculum and then blame schools, teachers, students, parents, and society for not getting the job done. Many math curricula can do better than what was used before, but absolute improvements against international standards  matter more than  small relative improvements against low state cut-off standards.

 

"Studies of the effects of the timing of practice on learning and retention date back more than 100 years. The role of distributed, or spaced, practice in the learning of mathematics in particular has been long studied. "

Right. And <a href="http://ednews.org/articles/the-case-for-everyday-mathematics--.html?comment_id=5561#comment_5561">as LL pointed out, in comment 32, researchers who study distributed practice cite Saxon Math as the exemplar</a>.

Here is Siegfried Engelmann on the subject of the spiral curriculum:

Translated into practice, the spiral curriculum is a series of different, unrelated topics that parade past the kids year after year. Kids dabble in measurement for a while before moving on to the next unit, which may be geometry, which is followed by whole-number operations, which is followed by fractions, ... and so forth. Typically, about 60 school days pass before any topic is revisited. Stated differently, the spiral curriculum is exposure, not teaching. You don't "teach" something and then put it on the shelf for 60 days. It doesn't have a shelf-life of more than a few days. It would be outrageous enough to do that with one topic--let alone all of them.

[snip]

Bruner's endorsement of the spiral curriculum suggests the extent to which cognitivists lack a comprehensive schema of a kid's brain. Don't they know that if something is just taught, it will atrophy the fast way if it is not reinforced, kindled, and used? Don't they know that the suggested "revisiting of topics" requires putting stuff that had been recently taught on the shelf where it will shrivel up? Don't they know that the constant "reteaching" and "relearning" of topics that have gone stale from three months of disuse is so inefficient and impractical that it will lead not to learning but to mere exposure? And don't they know that when the "teaching" becomes reduced to exposure, kids will understandably figure out that they are not expected to learn and that they'll develop adaptive attitudes like, "We're doing that ugly geometry again, but don't worry. It'll soon go away and we won't see it for a long time"? Apparently not, even though it would take very little time working in a classroom to document all of the above.

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Schools-Academic-Child/dp/0894202871/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244216777&sr=8-1">War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse by Siegfried Engelmann</a>, p. 108

I love the Everyday Math program!  I'm a math tutor and have doubled my business because of Everyday Math.  Parents pay big bucks to have their children learn math from me because they are not learning at school.  Most studetns can't tell me an algorithm for any problem but a mixture of several ways to try and find an answer.  Their math vocabulary is weak ans their pencil and paper skills are so poor I have to ask what they are writing.

Keep using Everyday Math I enjoy my job very much.

I taught with Everyday Mathematics for over ten years and loved it.  I used it in a public school in Connecticut and an independent school in New Jersey.   I only worked in Connecticut for a year and at the time the district was in the process of switching from EM to Addison-Wesley.  I was told the change was due to a new superintendent coming in and changing things.  However, the school I was working in cared passionately enough to fight and they were allowed to keep EM because they had the data to prove it worked for their kids.  That year I used a combination of EM and Addison-Wesley (two grade levels below) because I was working one-on-one with a student on the autism spectrum with mild retardation.  The Everyday Math word problems and patterns (Frames and Arrows) required thinking that was too high level and required too much working memory for a mildly retarded and autistic child, but the straightforward, highly predictable Addison-Wesley tasks worked just fine for him.  I would use the EM problems to stretch him, though, and he showed great gains in both thinking skills and self-confidence that year.

 Despite all the drama it's apparently caused elsewhere in the country, there were only a few complaints about the math in the independent school where I taught third grade for a decade.  This is partly because parents had a choice whether or not to send their children to our school.  However, parents certainly complained, at times heatedly, about the way we taught other subjects like spelling and handwriting, which, admittedly, we had very little time leftover for.  The parents who did complain about the math were parents who wanted their children to be the top of the class and have "an edge" over others.  They preferred vertical learning (learning by rote, and continuing to go to a higher level with a concept over a short period of time) than in-depth learning.  This was a style preference and, being a constructivist school with a developmentally-based curriculum, we had to remind those parents of the school philosophy.  We never had complaints about the quality of the math program itself, but also all of the K--3 teachers I worked with were solid math teachers who were very clear, assessed constantly, compared notes across grade levels and adjusted their teaching to match students' needs.  I did get questions from time to time where parents wondered whether their children were meeting grade level standards, etc.  This had more to do with the fact that I was teaching at an independent school that did not publish benchmarks and did not give students grades until sixth grade.   To help alleviate parent anxiety, I started attaching the EM assessment sheets (Individual Profile of Progress) that showed the expected level of mastery for each skill to the corrected unit tests and all the questions stopped.  By the way, our students consistently scored very well on the math section of the ERB in grades four and up.  We did not use standardized tests to measure math achievement prior to fourth grade.

 I left the classroom to become an elementary level curriculum coordinator at another independent school before I had the chance to use the latest edition, but I now have several sample kits sitting in my office and have been looking to see what's changed.  I have the kits here because my boss' son's school uses EM and she is crazy about it.  It's just so child appropriate!  Her son comes home everyday excited about what he's learned in math.  So, we might start using it here.  I'm excited by the alignment with the NCTM curriculum focal points and the added guidance in making family connections.  Why so much focus on this someone asked?  Because parent education is key.  So many of the individuals who have posted to this board about EM sound like they have not been adequately educated about the program.  As for the parents who work in mathematics fields and think they know what a good math curriculum is, its easy for someone who has always liked math and for whom it came easily to dismiss the EM philosophy.  I think it's interesting that so much of the hysteria in the posts is about at what grade level certain topics are introduced or whether or not certain algorithms are taught instead of whether the program is aligned with understandings about child cognitive development.  My students "got" Everyday Math.  I had one or two weak math students every year, and know that would have been the case with any math program, but my students learned the concepts and skills with such familiarity that they didn't even have to study for tests.  And their learning endured thanks to the recurrent mixed review opportunities and thanks to the program's careful building on prior knowledge.

BUT, I can tell you that teacher quality does make a difference, and this is also true about any math program.  It's so insulting to the teaching profession that publishers feel they have to create "teacher-proof" programs; and that speaks to a universally weak commitment to teacher training in this country.  Even though EM lesson plans are easy to follow and somewhat scripted, it's up to the teacher to be clear about the lesson objective, to assess continuously and respond to student needs.  You can choose to go through the lessons passively day after day without really assessing your students, which is what a teacher in one of the upper elementary grades at my old school did, or you can choose to do a good job.   A good teacher supplements any program based on student needs and interests or school-wide goals.   Of course students have to study their basic math facts at home-- just like their spelling and sight words-- and no math program can provide enough practice time in itself without falling behind on other content.  EM at least has devised ways to make practice fun by turning it into a series of games.  Multiplication Baseball was always a huge hit.

I reiterate, I have always loved teaching Everyday Math.   In fact, by teaching Everyday Math I actually found my "inner mathematician," long buried by a negative attitude toward math as something boring that you just had to memorize or physically practice into memory. When I was a kid, I would get so bored in math class watching my math teacher model over and over exactly how she wanted us to solve problems.  She made it look so easy, I would skip the homework and then do poorly on quizzes.  Thanks to Everyday Math, I now understand math, and even better, I now know how to solve those brain teasers I couldn't do in high school Math League.  Drawing pictures, charts or diagrams is often the key with those problems and when you're taught only to memorize procedures and formulas, then you are crippled when faced with a problem that a simple drawing makes much more obvious. Everyday Math designs lessons and activities carefully to keep children engaged and thinking.  The word problems don't make it easy to set up a number model -- students really have to read carefully and think about it. Good reading skills make a difference with Everyday Math, but good teachers can work around this by reading directions and problems to weaker readers.  

I could go on and on.  It's a great program.  But remember, no program can survive a poor teacher or a disorganized administration.