A Longitudinal Study of the Efficacy
of Singapore Math in a Rural MA
School District
Preliminary Findings
Goldfish Project
The Gabriella and Paul Rosenbaum Foundation
• The mathematics and science performance of US
students has been a source of anxiety for many years.
In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act was put in
place to diagnose the difficulties and mandate
improvement. It is now years later; US students, who
were within TIMSS’ averages range for math in 1999,
continued so in the 2003 and in 2007 TIMSS.
Meantime NCLB provided local and detailed
documentation of our students’ frustrating struggle
with school math.
• TIMSS also served to turn US eyes to Singapore,
whose students consistently took top place in math.
Singaporeans credit much of the success of their
students to their excellent textbooks. US
mathematicians agree that, in contrast to texts
published in the US, Singapore’s math textbooks are
world class.
• Solid documentation became available for this view.
In “What the United States Can Learn from
Singapore’s World-Class Mathematics System”, a
2005 study funded by the US Department of
Education, there is a detailed textbook comparison of
Singapore’s Primary Mathematics series with Scott
Foresman’s and Everyday Mathematics’. The report
also compared Singapore’s 6th grade assessment
items with 8th grade items from NAEP and selected
States, concluding that Singapore’s were more
difficult.
• The initial hundreds of US Home Schoolers using the
Primary Math books have grown, largely through
word of mouth, to thousands. However, schools have
been slower to adopt them. Recently a few school
districts as well as a number of individual schools
have begun implementing what is colloquially known
as Singapore math. Being recent, these adoptions
cannot yet answer the persistent argument that “yes
these books do well in Singapore: but how do we know
they will do well in the US?”
• It is to answer this question that
the Rosenbaum Foundation has
undertaken a rigorous longitudinal
statistical study of the North
Middlesex Regional School District
(NMSD) in Massachusetts,1 the
single school district whose
Singapore math implementation
began in 2000.
1
See http://nmiddlesex.mec.edu/~nmrhshome/District_Profile/profiletm.html
(Waight (2006)).
• NMSD is a rural school district, serving the towns of
Ashby, Pepperell and Townsend. In response to poor
student performance on state assessments, this
district introduced a number of their teachers to the
Singapore mathematics syllabus during a 2000
summer institute.
• Participation in the Singapore mathematics
curriculum (Singapore’s Primary Mathematics,3rd Ed.
for grades 1-6 and New Elementary
Mathematics(Syllabus D) for grades 7-8) has been
voluntary at the discretion of the individual teacher2.
Fortunately, complete records were kept.
2Voluntary teacher participation in a program is known to be most effective for its
sound implementation.
New K-8 school curricula are most easily
begun with K-1 or K-2, with another grade
added each year thereafter. However, NMSD
chose to begin SM in their middle schools.
The pilot program was very popular with
participating teachers and this enthusiasm
was clearly contagious. By the 2005-2006
school year, every classroom in grades 1-6 was
using the Singapore math.
• Our statistical analyses utilize the results of
the MCAS test required for all Massachusetts
schools . The outcome variable in the analyses
is the individual student’s Grade 3 through
Grade 8 and Grade 10 MCAS mathematics
test score for the years 2000 – 2008.
• To now we have barely begun our analysis but
this “first cut” (largely based on class means)
is sufficiently striking to serve as an interim
report. As the graph below illustrates, NMSD
test scores have been and are higher than the
State scores.
• Disaggregated: test scores of NMSD students
participating in Singapore math are higher
than the test scores of students not in
Singapore math-taught classes.
yes
no
• Proficiency levels of NMSD students
participating in Singapore math are higher
than those of students not in Singapore mathtaught classes and higher than those of the
State.
Continuing Analyses
We will continue analyses based on cohorts of
students as they pass through NMSD grades.
The multiple factors that influence the efficacy of
Singapore math materials and techniques in the
classroom will be taken into account.
The above will be elucidated by analyses based on
individual students’ results and Singapore math
experience in the same cohorts.
Continuing Analyses
Analyses to date suggest that longer exposure to
Singapore Math instruction gives higher MCAS
raw scores (Hotelling’s t scores and Correlation
Confidence (1-α) levels of >0.8 for class means for
cohorts 2003-2007 (i.e., from 4th grade in 2003
through 8th in 2007, 4th grade in 2004 through 7th
in 2007, etc.). These results will be verified and
amplified in the remainder of the project.