JUMP Math in grade four classrooms

It is important for any new curriculum to go through a series of tests to ensure its effectiveness before a widespread adoption of the material into school systems. This evaluation should examine how students, including those who are low achieving (LA), perform with the use of the program. The primary purpose of this study was to compare the progress that three groups of students made, when teachers used different methods of mathematics instruction. One group of teachers used exclusively JUMP Math (JM1), one group of teachers used the materials used by the school district in the past (Control) and a third group of teachers used a combination of these two methods (JM2). Computational skills, fluency of simple addition, subtraction and multiplication questions, and number series measures were used to assess students in a pretest post-test quasi-experimental manner. The analysis conducted was achieved by using the change in scores between the pretest and the post-tests. For the whole sample, significant results were found on two of the measures. On one of the computational skills measures the control group was significantly better than JM1, and on the number series measure JM1 performed significantly better than JM2. For the students who were low achieving, JM2 performed significantly better than JM1 on the fluency measure. The other comparisons did not show statistical differences. As this was the first year for the teachers in the experimental conditions to use the JM program, future research should inquire whether there is a difference between the students when they are more comfortable with the program.Education, Faculty ofEducational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department ofGraduat