A Low-Cost, Highly Effective Math Program
There’s no large, new financial investment coming over the horizon for America’s public schools. And yet, students still have a lot of unmet need.
So how can policymakers boost student outcomes while making do with limited resources? This environment demands a new playbook than the one policymakers were able to pursue during the COVID recovery era, when district budgets were flush with federal relief funds. With that money now gone, policymakers will need to pay special attention to cost and effectiveness.
Today I’m going to highlight one such example: A low-cost, highly effective math program called ASSISTments.
Simply explained, ASSISTments is a tool that helps teachers assign, support, and grade student homework. It takes textbook-based problems from the school’s existing curriculum and embeds them into a digital platform. When teachers assign practice problems, ASSISTments provides students with real-time hints and immediate feedback on the correct answers. At the back end, teachers receive reports about how their students performed, which they can then use to shape future instruction.
ASSISTments is able to keep costs down because its content is tied to open-source resources including Illustrative Mathematics, Open Up Resources, and Eureka Math (EngageNY). (All of these are highly rated by EdReports as being well aligned to state standards.) When WestEd calculated the total expenditures for 63 schools in North Carolina to implement the ASSISTments program, they estimated it came out to about $46-70 per student.
This is quite a low cost, especially for a program with strong outcomes. And, in two separate randomized controlled trials in Maine and North Carolina, ASSISTments did lead to large gains. The first one, in Maine, had a sample of 46 public schools with 3,050 7th grade students. The second study, in North Carolina, had a sample of 63 public schools serving 9,073 7th graders.
The Arnold Ventures’ Evidence-Based Policy team summarized the results of the two studies:
Both studies found sizable effects on math achievement on established, standardized tests. The effect size in the Maine study, measured at the end of seventh grade, represented about a 60% improvement over the annual gain in math otherwise expected of seventh graders. The North Carolina study was unable to measure impacts at the end of seventh grade (due to the COVID-19 pandemic), but found a sustained impact at the end of 8th grade – one year after program completion. The effect size represented about a 31% improvement over the annual gain in math otherwise expected of eighth graders.
The No-Spin Evidence Review group concluded that, “Taken together, the Maine and North Carolina studies constitute strong, replicated RCT evidence of effectiveness.”
The ASSISTments program has now been evaluated and replicated in two randomized controlled trials. It’s a low-cost, highly effective program tied to three popular math programs. Policymakers looking to boost their middle school math outcomes should consider whether the ASSISTments model could be expanded into their schools.