For years, Department of Special Education professor Sarah Powell has combined forces with Southern Methodist University’s Leanne Ketterlin Geller and Erica Lembke at the University of Missouri to improve the math education of kids across the country.
Now, a $14 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will allow them to further expand their efforts to rural and out-of-school settings. The award, which is among the largest of its kind, comes as a result of years-long measurable data from a 2022 research grant titled SCALE which suggests students utilizing the researcher’s fraction math intervention replication plan in cities in Texas, Missouri and multiple other states are making significant progress.
We are really excited to be able to expand beyond what we know works currently,
Powell said. Now, we can focus on rural settings too with the mission of impacting the fraction learning of kids all over the United States.
The 2022 Education, Innovation and Research award through the U.S. Department of Education for SCALE, which lasts until the 2026-2027 school year, focused on replicating a fraction intervention program developed by researchers in Tennessee titled Fraction Face Off in fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms in Texas, Missouri and other states.
Last summer, Powell said they decided to apply for funding of an expansion of SCALE, which is titled SCALE-UP, due to the positive data in the first two years of the SCALE project. According to student data, the intervention was working as it was designed to do so and the results were almost identical to those observed by the original authors of the program.
Those who participated in the program showed improvement in their understanding of fractions, with some even rising an entire standard deviation higher than those who did not participate — an unusually high degree of change.
Powell said they submitted their application in July for funding the SCALE-UP expansion. By December, they were notified that theirs was one of three projects at similar stages that had been selected to receive funding for an expansion.
Our team is incredibly honored to be selected to do this work,
Powell said. We know a lot of people apply for grants and not everybody gets them. We are grateful that people trust us, that we have a good program on our hands, and that we are going to do well with that program over the next five years with a number of teachers and students across the United States.
SCALE-UP will first focus on rural settings in partnership with researchers at universities in California, Georgia, Hawaii, Missouri, Texas and Virginia, with a hope of eventually partnering with researchers in more states.
Additionally, Powell said the original SCALE project will see an expansion, moving into use at the middle school level too.
The goal, Powell said, is to implement the program in schools in 15 states. To make it easier for teachers to access the program’s training, she said they have put it all online for self-paced, virtual learning. This way, any teacher in the U.S. can participate in SCALE-UP and implement Fraction Face Off at their own pace.
The materials, such as manipulatives, are mailed by the researchers to participating teachers.
When we think about schools implementing evidence-based practices, accessibility is really important,
Powell said.
In order to attract more partner classrooms, Powell said they begin with recruitment at the district level. Once they have received approval from someone in the district, she said they move on to chatting with principals and then fourth- and fifth-grade teachers. Everyone involved, including the student and their parents, must agree to participate in the project.
When we hear the teachers say ‘the students I am tutoring with Fraction Face Off are doing better with fractions than other students in the classroom’–that kind of anecdotal story keeps you going and is very exciting,
Powell said.
The projects are among five grants that the three researchers have applied for since 2018. From working together to improve middle school math education to leading a doctoral program called LIME across their three institutions, Powell said she, Ketterlin Geller and Lembke complement one another with their specific areas of expertise.
According to Powell, their joint research projects and the partnerships that they encourage through programs like LIME bring to light that academia is made better with collaboration.
To be able to do this research grant together and do other projects to bring people together is a blast,
Powell said. I also think it is better for the field. We are more productive as a team than we would be individually.
In the future, Powell said they have their sights set on expanding SCALE-UP to out-of-school settings such as the Boys & Girls Club afterschool programs and tutoring settings.
Additionally, Powell said they hope to use their research of fraction intervention implementation in diverse settings to inform general math intervention and beyond to make a greater impact on kids across the country.
If this works in rural settings and out of school settings, then you should be able to take a word problem intervention, an algebra intervention, a geometry intervention and also do it in those settings,
Powell said. Maybe this could be helpful not just in math but in reading and writing too.
