Our Funded
Project Teams
Overview
EF+Math funds two types of project teams: Prototyping and Applied Research. Prototyping teams are developing math learning approaches that embed EF skill-building opportunities within equitable, high-quality math content and instruction. Applied Research teams are developing technical capacities that boost math learning prototypes’ effectiveness by making student learning visible and guiding actionable next steps for learning. They are being tested in the Prototyping math learning approaches and are designed to work across multiple learning approaches, including those that already exist. All EF+Math project teams are partnering with educators who specialize in working with Black and Latinx students and students experiencing poverty, including our District Co-Design Partners and our Educator Leadership Council, who provide important guidance and input into the projects.
Prototyping Projects
A web-based learning system for facilitating collaborative mathematical discourse and problem solving with embedded executive function scaffolds to create safe spaces for historically marginalized students to express their ideas and share their thinking and reasoning. CueThinkEF+ is for students in grades 6-8.
Lead Organization: CueThink
Current & Former District Partners: Cajon Valley Union School District & Hillside Public Schools
An online collaborative problemsolving and storytelling program that supports students in developing their identities and strengths as mathematical thinkers with strong executive function skills. Mathematical Thinkers Like Me is for students in grades 6-8.
Lead Organization: The 21st Century Partnership for STEM
Current District Partners: Vista Unified School District & Newark Public Schools
A comprehensive set of supports for the math classroom that attend to cultural relevance, math identity and belonging, executive functioning skills, mathematization of concepts that students find relevant, the realities of classrooms and current practice, and classroom social norms. Spark Math is for students in grade 6.
Lead Organization: Saga Education
Current District Partners: Middletown City Schools, East Jasper Consolidated School District, & Meridian Public School District
A series of movement-based games that make meaningful connections between math learning in the classroom and the schoolyard and provide a playful context for students to engage in embodied rational number learning while strengthening executive function skills. Fraction Ball is for students in grades 3-8.
Lead Organization: University of California, Irvine
Current District Partner: Santa Ana Unified School District
An innovative three-layer instructional approach that uses interactive graphic novels, individual gamebased learning, collaborative learning experiences that facilitate team work and academic discourse, and opportunities to engage in problembased learning activities that link to math in the real world. MathicSTEAM is for students in grades 4 & 5.
Lead Organization: MIND Research Institute
Current & Former District Partners: Ocean View School District, Santa Ana Unified School District, & Attleboro Public Schools
A program that includes a sequential set of activities designed to center students as strong math problem solvers who use appropriate EF skills to guide their process. Our Mathematical World is for students in grades 3-5.
Lead Organizations: Purdue University & Virginia Tech
Current & Former District Partners: Middletown City Schools & Alum Rock Union School District
Applied Research Projects
Elevating Math Knowledge, EF Skills, and Metacognition, and Making These Insights Actionable
Development of embedded, real-time measures of executive function skills in math based on digital student interactions and teacher observations. Insights from these measures will provide actionable, equitable insights to teachers in real time.
Lead Organization: Enlearn
Accurate, Precise, Equitable and Useful Models of the State of the Learner
Creation of a computational model that aims to understand an individual learner’s behavior on math tasks while accounting for that learner’s (1) internal cognitive and perceptual processes, (2) socio-emotional skills and current state, and (3) environmental context.
Lead Organizations: University of Maryland, College Park
MAT+EF: Developing a Low-Cost Mobile App to Reveal Excellence in EFs and Math Learning
Development of a set of reliable and equitable tools to visualize math skills and underlying executive function skills and dynamics in those functions using mobile app technology. Draws from successes in personalized medicine, applied for the first time in education.
Lead Organizations: University of California, Irvine & Washington University in St. Louis
Pennesota: Scalable, MultiDimensional Measures of Learner Strategies During Math Learning
Development of measures to reveal moment-by-moment learner strategies.
Lead Organizations: University of Pennsylvania & University of Minnesota