A Longitudinal Study of the Efficacy of Singapore Math in a Rural MA

School DistrictPreliminary Findings

Goldfish ProjectThe Gabriella and Paul Rosenbaum Foundation

• The mathematics and science performance of US students has been a source of anxiety for many years. In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act was put in place to diagnose the difficulties and mandate improvement. It is now years later; US students, who were within TIMSS’ averages range for math in 1999, continued so in the 2003 and in 2007 TIMSS. Meantime NCLB provided local and detailed documentation of our students’ frustrating struggle with school math.

• TIMSS also served to turn US eyes to Singapore, whose students consistently took top place in math. Singaporeans credit much of the success of their students to their excellent textbooks. US mathematicians agree that, in contrast to texts published in the US, Singapore’s math textbooks are world class.

• Solid documentation became available for this view. In “What the United States Can Learn from Singapore’s World-Class Mathematics System”, a 2005 study funded by the US Department of Education, there is a detailed textbook comparison of Singapore’s Primary Mathematics series with Scott Foresman’s and Everyday Mathematics’. The report also compared Singapore’s 6th grade assessment items with 8th grade items from NAEP and selected States, concluding that Singapore’s were more difficult.

• The initial hundreds of US Home Schoolers using the Primary Math books have grown, largely through word of mouth, to thousands. However, schools have been slower to adopt them. Recently a few school districts as well as a number of individual schools have begun implementing what is colloquially known as Singapore math. Being recent, these adoptions cannot yet answer the persistent argument that “yes these books do well in Singapore: but how do we know they will do well in the US?”

• It is to answer this question that the Rosenbaum Foundation has undertaken a rigorous longitudinal statistical study of the North Middlesex Regional School District (NMSD) in Massachusetts,1 the single school district whose Singapore math implementation began in 2000.

1 See http://nmiddlesex.mec.edu/~nmrhshome/District_Profile/profiletm.html (Waight (2006)).

• NMSD is a rural school district, serving the towns of Ashby, Pepperell and Townsend. In response to poor student performance on state assessments, this district introduced a number of their teachers to the Singapore mathematics syllabus during a 2000 summer institute.

• Participation in the Singapore mathematics curriculum (Singapore’s Primary Mathematics,3rd Ed. for grades 1-6 and New Elementary Mathematics(Syllabus D) for grades 7-8) has been voluntary at the discretion of the individual teacher2. Fortunately, complete records were kept.

2Voluntary teacher participation in a program is known to be most effective for its sound implementation.

New K-8 school curricula are most easily begun with K-1 or K-2, with another grade added each year thereafter. However, NMSD chose to begin SM in their middle schools.

The pilot program was very popular with participating teachers and this enthusiasm was clearly contagious. By the 2005-2006 school year, every classroom in grades 1-6 was using the Singapore math.

• Our statistical analyses utilize the results of the MCAS test required for all Massachusetts schools . The outcome variable in the analyses is the individual student’s Grade 3 through Grade 8 and Grade 10 MCAS mathematics test score for the years 2000 – 2008.

• To now we have barely begun our analysis but this “first cut” (largely based on class means) is sufficiently striking to serve as an interim report. As the graph below illustrates, NMSD test scores have been and are higher than the State scores.

• Disaggregated: test scores of NMSD students participating in Singapore math are higher than the test scores of students not in Singapore math-taught classes.

yes no

• Proficiency levels of NMSD students participating in Singapore math are higher than those of students not in Singapore math-taught classes and higher than those of the State.

Continuing Analyses

We will continue analyses based on cohorts of students as they pass through NMSD grades.

The multiple factors that influence the efficacy of Singapore math materials and techniques in the classroom will be taken into account.

The above will be elucidated by analyses based on individual students’ results and Singapore math experience in the same cohorts.

Analyses to date suggest that longer exposure to Singapore Math instruction gives higher MCAS raw scores (Hotelling’s t scores and Correlation Confidence (1-α) levels of >0.8 for class means for cohorts 2003-2007 (i.e., from 4th grade in 2003 through 8th in 2007, 4th grade in 2004 through 7th in 2007, etc.). These results will be verified and amplified in the remainder of the project.

Continuing Analyses