EF+Math Program - Applied Research Track

Overview

<p>Housed within NewSchools Venture Fund, the EF+Math Program is equity-focused, research-informed and designed with educators at the center.  Every student has the potential to be a powerful math learner, yet only 40 percent of 4th grade students in the U.S. are proficient or advanced in math, and the numbers go down even further in later grades. We may not have made progress because we have been ignoring a key component of how students learn math.</p> <p>Math success is critical to many factors for success in young adulthood, and executive function is foundational for learning math and reading, and for developing other mindsets, skills and habits for success in life. These fundamentals are particularly important for students who have been historically underserved by the education system.</p> <p><strong>What<br></strong>We are focused on unlocking the potential that already exists in each student to build executive functions while learning high-quality math content. Our specific interest is in students in grades 3-8 who have been historically underserved. These students deserve the best tools to build the foundations necessary for excellence in math. EF+Math will fund and support teams to co-design and develop new approaches to build math-relevant executive function skills during high-quality math instruction.</p> <p><strong>How<br></strong></p> <p>We take an inclusive R&D approach with educators at the center. Educators, researchers and developers co-design and then rapidly iterate on solutions together. Teachers are experts — both in content and the contexts in which math is taught. Our approach leans into their knowledge and expertise, particularly those who serve students in historically under-resourced schools. At every step, the multi-disciplinary teams co-create solutions that work in real-world classrooms.</p> <p><strong>Success<br></strong>Our mission is to empower every student, teacher and parent with the knowledge that all students are powerful learners, regardless of opportunities provided by background or circumstance. Every young person is already equipped with the foundational skills of executive functions that are needed to learn anything, particularly rigorous math. By funding new approaches to give students opportunities to practice building math-relevant executive function skills while learning challenging math, we aim to significantly increase the number of students who are proficient or advanced in math.</p> <p>Our five-year program will fund multi-disciplinary teams to co-create solutions that integrate executive function-building activities into high-quality, evidence-based math instruction through 4 tracks: Designing for Use, Prototyping, Applied Research, and Evaluation. </p> <div style="padding-left:30px"><strong><strong>Applied Research Track<br></strong></strong>The EF+Math program works directly with teachers to understand what they want and need to know about how their students learn. This may require innovations to make learning visible and actionable in real time. The goal is to help teachers provide personalized, differentiated instruction to individual students, especially in large classes. The goal of the Applied Research track is to develop these innovations for integration into the learning systems developed under the Prototyping track.</div> <div style="padding-left:30px"></div> <div style="padding-left:30px">Methods developed in the Applied Research track are meant to be modular solutions that can work across multiple technologies to be developed in the Prototyping track. Technology that makes student learning visible and actionable requires at least two main innovations:</div> <div style="padding-left:30px"> <ul> <li> <p><strong>Making student learning visible. </strong>To evoke powerful learning, it is critical to understand what a student knows, when their attention is focused on the task at hand, whether or not they are cognitively overloaded, whether distractions are keeping them from learning and more. Strong proposals will describe technologies that offer this visibility in a clear, simple format that is easy for students and teachers to consume.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Making student learning actionable. </strong>When learning is visible, the next step is to identify actions to advance the learner. Information about the shifting executive function states of the learner should be used to adapt the prototype so it allows for differentiated instruction, personalized to each learner. Proposals may draw from the fields of reinforcement learning, deep learning networks and more. </p> </li> </ul> <p>All funded work will engage in <em>privacy by design</em>, in that they will adhere to the highest ethical standards and use rigorous privacy and security methods and practices to protect data. They will also strictly adhere to relevant federal privacy laws and regulations.</p> </div>