The nonprofit MIND Research Institute today released an analysis of 2012 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) test results showing that students using ST Math®, a visually based, digital math program, made significant gains in math proficiency compared to similar schools.
Twenty-three CPS schools that fully implemented the blended learning ST Math program for two years in a row saw an 11.4 point increase in percent of students who met or exceeded standards on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), while similar CPS schools without ST Math only grew 3.6 points.
“I have seen the impact ST Math has had on students in K-8th grade, both as a principal and as a district leader,” said John Price, Deputy Chief of Schools for the CPS. “With ST Math implementation in the upper grades at Audubon where I was principal, 100 percent of students that reached minimum completion goals [of the ST Math software curriculum] passed the ISAT test, including 100 percent of students that had failed the ISAT two or three times previously.”
A portion of the schools in the analysis participated in the philanthropically funded Chicago Math Initiative that MIND launched in 2009 to increase math achievement at lower-performing schools, and close the achievement gap often seen in urban areas. To support the national and Chicago-based Math Initiatives, MIND received more than $1.5 million from organizations including Cisco, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SAP, Wells Fargo Foundation and the University of Phoenix Foundation.
In the analysis, MIND examined ISAT scores at 23 CPS schools that implemented ST Math with 2,583 students in grades three, four and/or five in both 2010-11 and 2011-12. These were then compared to a group of 8,140 students in 118 CPS schools that did not use ST Math during that time. The analysis included schools where ST Math had been implemented for two years, at least 80 percent of students were using ST Math, and students completed at least 50 percent of the program for their grade level.
