Reprinted from Politico.com Morning Education: 'Teach to One’ shows gains

By CAITLIN EMMA | 12/04/14 10:00 AM EDT
With help from Eliza Collins, Maggie Severns and Stephanie Simon

‘TEACH TO ONE’ SHOWS GAINS: A technology-driven approach to teaching math shows promise in helping struggling low-income students move toward proficiency, according to an analysis by Douglas Ready of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Students in the program, known as “School of One” or “Teach to One,” are assessed daily on their math skills. An algorithm then recommends units of study for the following day. In any given classroom, some students will be listening to an online lesson, others will be collaborating with peers and still others will be studying with a tutor or working through a personalized problem set. More than 6,000 students in Chicago, New York, D.C. and elsewhere went through the program last year, some of them for the second year in a row. As a group, their scores on the MAP math assessment improved significantly — and students who started with the weakest math skills made the most strides. Overall, students in the program gained math skills at a rate that was nearly 47 percent higher than the national average, as measured by the MAP test.

— The study cautioned that the gains could not be attributed for certain to the Teach to One model, since there could be confounding variables. Nonetheless, “these early results are quite promising,” Ready wrote — especially since student skills improved faster last year than they did in the first year of the program. The program is aimed at students in grades 5 through 8. Read more: http://bit.ly/1pUzBni

Published Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014