New Fort Worth math curriculum teaches kids not just how to work with numbers, but why

After years of lackluster math test scores, the Fort Worth Independent School District is now using a new math curriculum that district officials say will help students understand not only how to work with numbers, but also why they might need to.

The district adopted a pair of new math curricula at the beginning of the current school year. Elementary schools in the district now use Eureka Math, and middle schools use Carnegie Learning. District officials say the new curricula focus more on problem-solving and conceptual learning and less on memorization of formulas.

Officials say the new approach helps students apply the mathematical concepts they’ve learned in class to real-world problems, helping them develop a deeper understanding of math.

“They don’t grow as frustrated as easily,” said Marcey Sorensen, the district’s chief academic officer. “They can see the step-by-step-by-step-by-step concept.”

Conceptual learning replaces drill-and-kill

Before the change, students spent most of their math time doing repetitive practice of skills they were covering, said Shannon Hernandez, the district’s executive director of K-12 math and science. For elementary students, that might mean drilling multiplication tables until they had them memorized, she said.

The problem with that model, Hernandez said, was that students spent a lot of time mastering multiplication tables, but they often didn’t understand when and how to multiply. The curriculum didn’t do a good job of helping students connect the skills they’d learned to real-world situations in which they might come up, she said.

Now, Hernandez said students work on more conceptual assignments that help them understand why math works the way it does. Rather than spending a lot of time memorizing multiplication tables, students might work with small items like blocks or coins to learn how multiplication works, then move from there into working with numbers on a page.

The new model also gives students more leeway in how they get to a solution, Hernandez said. Where the old curriculum told students that there is a single prescribed avenue from every question to its answer, the new model helps students learn several different strategies and encourages them to pick one, then explain in writing why they selected the method they did and how they arrived at the solution, she said.

Sorensen said she saw that method in action during a recent visit to a class that was learning about addition. Under the old model, the teacher might have told students that four plus four equals eight, and they’d be expected to memorize that fact. Instead, the teacher wrote an eight on the board, then told students to use blocks to come up with all the ways to add up to eight that they could think of. Some students said six plus two. Others said four plus four. Any student who arrived at a wrong answer would figure it out quickly by counting the blocks, Sorensen said.

That model helps kids get a deeper understanding of math than the old drill-and-kill model of instruction, Sorensen said. When she visits a math class, she now sees kids working in groups to talk through math problems and developing problem-solving skills, she said.

The fact that the new model allows for more than one pathway to the correct answer is also helpful for kids who aren’t naturally predisposed to math, Sorensen said, because it allows for them to figure out answers in their own way rather than memorizing a formula. But it’s also effective for students who fared better under the old model because it pushes them to understand why those formulas work, she said.

The new approach aligns well with the redesign of the STAAR exam, which focuses less on rote memorization and more on conceptual thinking, Sorensen said. But the change in philosophy is a few years in the making, she said. It comes not in response to the upcoming changes to the state’s standardized tests, but to years of lackluster math scores, she said. Since 2017, less than a third of the district’s third-graders have scored on grade level in math each year the test was administered.

Sorensen said she and Hernandez discussed the need for a new math instructional framework well before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the academic disruptions of the pandemic made that need even more urgent.

COVID-19 learning loss hit harder in math than reading

Like many districts, Fort Worth is still struggling to help students make up ground they lost in math during school shutdowns. Just 17% of third-graders in the district are on track to meet grade-level standards on this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, Sara Arispe, the district’s associate superintendent of accountability and data quality, told the district’s school board at a November meeting.

That figure would represent a sharp decline from the 29% who scored on grade level last spring. Those projections are based on data from Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, tests that were administered at the beginning of the year, before students had any contact with the new math curriculum.

While those projections looked dire, Arispe cautioned the board not to be overly worried. The MAP testing data shows a snapshot of where students were at the beginning of the year, she said, and teachers use that information to pinpoint which students need extra help. Many hours of teaching and learning have happened since then, she said, and school officials are hopeful that those projections will improve once the district has results from mid-year MAP tests.

While the district posted strong growth in reading on last spring’s STAAR exams, it still lags behind pre-pandemic performance in math. And Fort Worth is hardly alone: This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as the nation’s report card, showed steeper declines across Texas and nationwide in math than in reading. Arispe said it’s likely that parents were better equipped to work with their children in reading than math during school shutdowns.

“Where students at home may have been engaged in some reading activities, very few students were engaged in mathematics,” Arispe said. “So there is more ground to gain there.”