One of the biggest impacts of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation has been the infusion of the word “research” into the language and thinking about education. Teachers are encouraged to ask, “Is my classroom curriculum research based?” “What about specialized interventions for students with disabilities?” It is a short step to asking the same question about today’s mathematics standards, and prominent researchers at Vanderbilt University have done just this in a series of randomized control studies.1
What the researchers described as “very low achieving” fourth grade students were randomly assigned to either inclusive or specialized intensive classrooms. Instruction in both conditions was guided by grade-level standards for fractions. It wasn’t a major surprise that the students in the inclusive classrooms performed poorly over the three years of the study as teachers fully implemented the Common Core State Standards. Researchers, however, were dismayed to find that the performance of students in specialized intensive settings also decreased over time, despite the use of their intervention curriculum in these studies.
A major conclusion from these studies as well as a related opinion piece2 is that the research basis for the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics is lacking and, perhaps, the standards are even inappropriate for struggling students and those with learning disabilities. In fact, these researchers argue that the strongest research base for these students can be found in instruction that focuses on foundational skills. The loftier goals (e.g., some of the mathematical practices, particular domain standards, real-world problem solving) may be too demanding, though the researchers are less clear on this point.
One of the virtues of the Vanderbilt research is that it reminds us that the capacity for all students within the same grade level to meet high standards is, at the least, unlikely. No high-performing country in the world has achieved this goal. In that regard, pushing “very low achieving” fourth grade students to understand difficult fractions concepts – students who were likely weak in their understanding of whole numbers and operations on whole numbers – yielded something that was intuitively sensible from the beginning. Yet it should be said that when the Common Core State Standards were introduced, their website stated clearly that these standards did not define the interventions needed for students well below grade level. The language on the Common Core website today is a bit more ambiguous. We are reminded that students with disabilities are a heterogeneous group, and that supports and accommodations are necessary. Most of all, we are reminded that the standards reflect knowledge and skills needed for post-secondary education.
Demanding that all standards should be research based is not just a misinterpretation of standards, but it is misguided thinking as well. The same applies to the notion that just because there is research on ways to teach basic skills, this is the only kind of instruction that struggling students should experience. More than a decade ago, James Hiebert3 reminded us during the controversy over the NCTM standards that standards, by their nature, are primarily about values and priorities. The relationship between standards and research is complicated. Suppose, for example, that a series of research studies showed the best way to teach hand calculation of multidigit by multidigit multiplication of decimal numbers. What do we do with this kind of research in a world where computers and even hand calculators do this work infinitely faster and much more accurately? Most certainly, standards can sponsor research questions, as was found in the Vanderbilt studies described earlier.
In fact, one of the most interesting observations that the Vanderbilt researchers made about their studies is what their curriculum for the specialized intervention classes did not contain. Meeting the needs of struggling students may involve grade-level standards, but it is essential that instruction also include out-of-grade-level standards. In other words, we need to meet students where they are instructionally and build toward valued standards or instructional targets. They may take more than one grade level to accomplish, and most certainly, it means putting much greater emphasis on some standards and not others.
Where these researchers run aground in their thinking is in the claim that instruction for struggling students needs to focus almost exclusively on foundational skills. A wide body of research indicates that struggling students and those with learning disabilities can learn the concepts behind mathematical operations and major math ideas (e.g., the role of place-value whole number operations, equal shares and part-to-whole relationships in fractions) as well as complex problem solving. And as the Common Core Standards make clear, these outcomes are highly valued in today’s technology-driven economic environment. No one, after all, is hired today for their capacity to perform long division or add two fractions with unlike denominators.
My next blog will discuss the structure of a curriculum for struggling students that contains these features.
References
1 Fuchs, L. et al. (2015). Inclusion versus specialized intervention for very-low-performing students: What does access mean in an era of academic challenge? Exceptional Children, 81(2), 134-157.
2 Powell, S., Fuchs, L., & Fuchs, D. (2013). Reaching the mountaintop: Addressing the common core standards in mathematics for students with mathematics difficulties. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 28(1), 38-48.
3 Hiebert, J. (1999). Relationships between research and the NCTM standards. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 30(1), 3-19.
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