Case Study - PS 132 Brooklyn

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School OverviewPs 132 The Conselyea School is an elementary school located in Brooklyn, NY, in the New York City (NYC) District # 14. The school serves a total of 767 students in grades PK-5 with a total faculty of 47 educators. The school is comprised of a diverse student body with 49% of students being of Hispanic descent, 35% Caucasian, 11% Black, and 5% Asian/Pacific Islander. Ninety-two percent of students in the school are eligible for Free/Reduced Lunch.1 Four percent of students in the school are identified as Limited English Proficient (LEP) with 14% of students having a learning disability. 2

New York State Assessments The New York State Assessment Program (NYSTP) was developed to assess students’ progress toward New York State Learning Standards.3 As part of the state’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards, since 2010 New York has been improving their assessment program to reflect increased rigor and college and career readiness expectations of students at all grade levels, including elementary school.4

For Mathematics, the NYSTP administers yearly assessments at grades 3-8. These tests are designed to measure grade-level expectations of students’ Mathematical capacity for Conceptual Understanding, Procedural Fluency, and Problem Solving. To demonstrate these abilities, students must demonstrate their proficiency in both Content Standards and Process Standards. The five Content Standards (Number Sense and Operations, Algebra, Geometry, Measurement, and Statistics and Probability) explicitly describe the grade-level expectations for students’ knowledge of mathematics, whereas the 1 Data based on 2011 School Year and obtained from National Center for Education

Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/).2 https://reportcards.nysed.gov/counties.php?year=2011

3 http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/ela/elarg.html

4?http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/pressRelease/20120717/home.html

five Process Standards (Problem Solving, Reasoning and Proof, Communication, Connections, and Representation) express ways students acquire and utilize said math knowledge.5

To gauge student progress toward these standards, the math assessment contains approx. 30-45 multiple choice items, as well as various short response items and long response items in which students compute their own responses as well produce their own work, such as creating graphs.

In New York, students’ test scores can be categorized into one of four levels of mastery: Below Standard (Level 1), Meets Basic Standard (Level 2), Meets Proficiency Standard (Level 3), and Exceeds Proficiency Standard (Level 4).

Student Success with Math in FocusTo assess if implementing HMH Math in Focus had an impact on learning, student test scores from the Spring of 2009 (prior to using the program) and the Spring of 2012 (after three years of usage) were obtained for students at PS 7 Kingsbridge at grades 3, 4, and 5. These findings are presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1

5 http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/mst/math/standards/

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Percent of Students at Levels 3/4

The comparison of achievement scores revealed that the percentage of students that Met or Exceeded the state Mathematics standards were greater in 2012, after using Math in Focus, with an average gain of over 14%.

Conclusion

This three-year examination of an implementation of HMH Math in Focus revealed that the program was associated with increased mathematics performance. This case study provides evidence that Math in Focus is an effective math program.