School Committee Members Learn about Math Preview Strategy

During the past school year, 35 kids at Wayland’s Claypit Hill and Happy Hollow elementary schools made it a point to stay after school once a week for sneak previews.

With that kind of commitment, you’d expect they were previewing the newest Pixar film or Harry Potter book, but in fact, they were previewing their upcoming math lessons.

Aidan McCann, a fourth grade teacher at Claypit, piloted a math preview strategy during the 2010-11 school year. The strategy was designed to give students with a math focus on their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) a chance to gain confidence and understanding of the unit’s math concepts before those concepts were introduced during regular classroom lessons.

“Those students have an opportunity to see the information that they were going to be learning with the entire class before the rest of the class,” McCann explained during a recent presentation at a School Committee meeting.

The after-school group was optional, McCann told School Committee members. In spite of it not being required, of the 37 children who started the program in November 2010, 35 remained in the program when it wrapped up for the school year in May 2011.

“What was significant is that the kids showed up,” McCann said, adding that the math scores and confidence of those kids went up measurably, which “kind of changed the classroom.”

McCann said previewing the math material with students who needed additional assistance opened up time in the classroom for him to work with his middle and higher-level learners. He said his time commitment after school once a week saved an “enormous amount of time” in the classroom.

McCann conducted a review program while working with students in Texas. When he came to Wayland, he decided he wanted to try to “front load the information” rather than review it. For the past three years, McCann has himself been conducting math preview sessions for his students, but the 2010-11 school year was a pilot year for the program in an expanded format.

For the pilot, McCann served as the program’s coordinator. He and seven willing teachers worked with small groups of about five students each, teaching the essential skills and “absolute musts” for the upcoming unit in math. The program’s $12,000 cost was funded by a Special Education grant and included a third, fourth and fifth grade group at Happy Hollow and a third, fourth and two fifth grade groups at Claypit Hill.

Some qualitative data collected during the pilot year revealed that 47 percent of students involved in the program said the preview sessions helped “a ton” in terms of getting better grades. Parents seemed to agree, with 90 percent of them saying they saw “a lot” or “significant” impact on academic performance.

For quantitative data, the program followed one entire classroom of students, those who were in the preview program and those who weren’t, and averaged the first three assessments (for September, October and November, which occurred before the preview sessions began) and the final five assessments (which occurred after the preview sessions began).

The non-preview group students showed an average gain of .06 points, which McCann said is to be expected.

“If they come in doing fairly well at the beginning of the year, you’d imagine they’d come out doing fairly well at the end of the year,” McCann explained.

The students who were part of the preview group, however, had an average gain of 11 points – more than a full letter grade, McCann said. Similar findings emerged when the quantitative sample was expanded.

School Committee member Shawn Kinney thanked McCann for his “innovative program” and asked whether this type of program could be effective with subjects other than math.

“Absolutely,” McCann responded. “I‘ve had a couple parents ask, “Can you please do this for reading.’”

Moving forward, McCann said he wants to gather “a large amount” of quantitative data that determines the effectiveness of the program.

McCann said he would like to expand the program next year to accommodate 60-70 students, but he assured School Committee members he did not come before them to seek money. Instead, he said he intends to spend the summer months seeking up to $25,000 in grant monies to fund the program.