CSUSB Receives $3.46 Million in Grants to Improve Mathematic Instruction

Cal State San Bernardino has received a $3 million federal grant and $463,370 in private grants to improve mathematics teaching and learning for pre-kindergarten to sixth grade English-language learner students in Riverside County. The grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund, or i3, will be combined with matching grants of $75,000 from the Packard Foundation, $150,000 from Toyota USA Foundation and $238,370 from the Heising-Simons Foundation, said CSUSB mathematics Professor Madeleine Jetter, who serves as the i3 project director of Teaching English Learners Early Mathematics or TEEM. “It is a testament to the excellence of the faculty in CNS, and Dr. Jetter in particular, to be awarded this highly competitive and prestigious grant,” said Kirsten Fleming, dean of the CSUSB College of Natural Sciences. “The work to be undertaken not only aligns well with the priorities of the college and the university, but is fundamentally important to addressing achievement gaps and equipping English-language learners to be successful in their education; attainment in early mathematics is a strong predictor of later success in school.” “TEEM is a project designed to improve mathematics teaching and learning for students designated as English learners in the early grade levels (pre-K through 6),” Jetter said. “We are working in partnership with the Riverside County Office of Education and two small Riverside County school districts, Romoland Elementary School District and Nuview Union School District.” TEEM is estimated to reach approximately 4,000 students per year and will address the high risk of school dropouts seen in the English-learner population, which is roughly twice that of non-English-learner students. In many cases, the dropout problem can be traced to issues with learning mathematics, Jetter said. “Our goal is to close the achievement gap separating English learners from their non-English learning peers,” Jetter said. “In the higher grades, the data shows the dropout problem is much worse for students classified as English learners and often, the roots of the dropout problem appear in the early grades when achievement gaps open and persist into high school.” “The thing that holds a lot of students back from succeeding in the secondary grades is mathematics,” Jetter said. “Algebra often is called a gatekeeper into advanced course work, and so when students have difficulties succeeding in algebra, it has negative repercussions for the students’ ability to succeed in terms of being able to graduate and being able to succeed in college and in careers afterward.” TEEM will hold an eight-day session in the last two weeks of July for participating teachers and principals, said Jetter, who added that the program has already recruited about 75 teachers from the two school districts that it will work with during the four-year grant period. Jetter said teachers already receive a lot of guidance, instruction and workshops about teaching English learners, but they don’t receive a lot of guidance in teaching math to English learners – particularly in order to support those students in learning the new math standards. “There’s a lot that teachers need to know, a lot of support that the teachers need to do that,” Jetter said. Teachers have to make sure that their students talk about mathematics. Students need opportunities to reason about problems and express their reasoning, Jetter said. What happens many times is that mathematics instruction can become teaching about vocabulary if teachers aren’t able to communicate properly with their English-learning students. “That’s not really what math is. It’s very important that teachers are able to hear their students’ mathematical reasoning and in order to do that, teachers really need to know about mathematics themselves,” Jetter said. “A lot of research shows us that kids come into school with a lot of effective ways of thinking mathematically, and so it’s important for the teacher to elicit that reasoning and build on that reasoning,” Jetter said. “When students see that they are capable of making sense of mathematics, they are much better prepared for the more complex mathematics to come.” The program will work to develop school principals as instructional leaders in mathematics. Principals will deepen their understanding of state standards for mathematics content and practices, and grow more effective in their use of formative data about teaching and learning math, Jetter said. The U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) was established under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It provides funding to support local educational agencies, and nonprofit organizations in partnership with one or more LEAs or a consortium of schools. The i3 program is designed to generate and validate solutions to persistent educational challenges and to support the expansion of effective solutions to serve substantially larger numbers of students.