Addressing Math Difficulties at FCA

America’s education system suffered a terrible blow when schools switched to virtual learning throughout the covid pandemic. One of the main academic areas in which our nation’s students have struggled has been with regard to math achievement. The results from the 2022 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed the lowest numbers of fourth and eighth grade students that achieved mathematical proficiency since 2005 and 2000, respectively (The Nation’s Report Card, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). While Frederick Christian Academy was able to put policies and protocols into place that allowed them to open for in-person instruction as of the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, FCA has not been immune to the effects of covid learning loss. Our school enrollment has increased dramatically over the last few years, and we have seen an increased number of students enroll with either math difficulties or with significant gaps in their math achievement.

FCA’s mission is to assist parents in educating their children in accordance with Biblical principles by providing high-quality spiritual and academic programs while encouraging students to live Christ-centered lives. Our desire is to provide an educational program that meets the needs of our students, drives them to educational excellence, is grounded in a biblical worldview, and glorifies God. This year we chose to try a pilot program with our seventh-grade students using the IXL Math online learning platform to see if IXL may help to support all our students with their math achievement scores. Our goal was to strengthen our commitment to our mission by finding a way to partner with all of the FCA Family, including those with students that are exhibiting math difficulties.

IXL Math was chosen for this intervention mainly because of its proprietary diagnostic tool. By having the students answer a series of questions in the “Diagnostic Arena,” IXL can identify specific math skills with which each student is struggling. This allows for each student to receive targeted, differentiated assistance in the areas of math in which they personally needed help. These identified skills may not always align with the skills that the students are learning in their current math class. While IXL does allow for specific skills to be hand selected for extra practice, the purpose of the diagnostic tool is to identify areas of needed remediation across the mathematical spectrum.

The pilot program we conducted included a four-week intervention using IXL Math during the seventh-grade students Thinking Skills class. The students were required to daily use the IXL Math online platform on their school-issued Chromebooks for the first twenty minutes of the class. Afterwards, the students could continue to develop their higher-order thinking skills through the other educational activities chosen by the classroom teacher. We required the students to focus on the skills identified by the IXL diagnostic tool. In addition, we conducted a pretest and posttest using the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement Third Edition (KTEA-3) so that we could see if IXL increased their math achievement scores with statistical significance.

Over the course of the four-week intervention, the students spent an average of approximately 400 minutes using IXL Math. In that time frame they raised their IXL diagnostic score by an average of 49 points, which represents an average of almost a 5-month increase in their IXL grade-level diagnostic score. More important, though, was the growth achieved in their KTEA-3 math achievement scores. The students KTEA-3 scores incorporate two strands: math composite and math fluency. Math composite scores show how well students understand grade-level math concepts and applications as well as their ability to complete grade-level math computations. Math fluency scores show how well they know and can use their math facts. Our seventh-grade students increased their math composite scores by an average of three percentiles. In addition, they increased their math fluency scores by an average of nine percentiles. That is a tremendous increase in only four weeks!

Correlational analysis of the data showed that use of the IXL program is positively correlated with increases in the students’ math achievement. In addition, the students’ math fluency correlation results were statistically significant (r = 0.96, p < 0.05). Achieving these results in such a short period of time was very encouraging! FCA is currently considering how we can utilize IXL Math across all grade levels in the coming year. If you are looking for a way to help your student increase their math achievement scores, I recommend considering whether IXL Math may be an effective tool for your family as well.

References:

The Nation’s Report Card. (n.d.-a) NAEP report card: Mathematics. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=4

The Nation’s Report Card. (n.d.-b) NAEP report card: Mathematics. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/nation/achievement/?grade=8