What the Research ACTUALLY Says About Helping Struggling Math Students

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to: What the Research ACTUALLY Says About Helping Struggling Math Students

I’ve been doing this – teaching about math, talking with teachers and coaches – for a lot of years now. And I recently realized I’d been sitting on something.

For YEARS, whenever I talked about helping struggling students, I’d point people back to a research guide that came out in 2009. Good guide. I referenced it constantly. But in 2021, they released a brand new one – a fully revised version.

I’ve mentioned it recently in conversations with teachers and coaches. And what I found out is most people had never heard of it. Didn’t know it existed. And these are sharp, dedicated educators.

I’ve realized I talked a lot about the 2009 guide but I have been lacking in sharing about the 2021 guide but that ends this summer because we are doing a “book” study on that guide. You can go to buildmathminds.com/bookstudy26 to join for free.

Here’s the thing about our world of education. So much of what you see online is opinion. This expert says do it this way. This teacher you follow on Instagram says to do this.  That program says do it the other way. This side is anti-this, that side is pro-that. And you – the person actually standing in front of kids – are stuck in the middle trying to figure out who to believe. It’s exhausting.

What makes this guide different is that it’s one of the rare places where the research didn’t split into camps. It converged. A whole stack of high-quality studies, all pointing the same direction, on how to help the kids who struggle the most. 

This practice guide from the Institute of Education Sciences and the What Works Clearinghouse, called Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics is THE compilation of research boiled down into 6 recommendations.  It’s free – you can download the PDF today.

And it wasn’t written by one person with an agenda to get people to do the thing they sell. A panel of math researchers dug into the bank of research. They searched the literature, they screened every study against the WWC’s evidence standards, and only the practices with a real body of strong research behind them made it in.

Now here’s what got me. The WWC rates each recommendation – strong, moderate, or minimal evidence. I figured it would be the usual mix: a couple strong ones, a couple “eh, moderate, promising.” Just like the one from 2009. But Nope. There are six recommendations in this guide, and every single one earned the highest rating. Strong evidence. All six.

I’m not going to walk you through all six right now – that’s literally what the three weeks of the book study are for – but just so you know the territory, they cover things like systematic instruction, mathematical language, representations, the number line, word problems… and there’s one more on that list that I guarantee is going to make some of you raise an eyebrow….timed activities.  Yup. I know.  It gave me pause too. But that’s why you need to read beyond the headline of the recommendations and dig into what the research says about each recommendation.  Because timed activities as they describe it in the guide is NOT the old timed test situation that we all tend to think of.

Now – I just told you it’s a free download. So you might be thinking, great, I’ll grab the PDF and read it myself this weekend. Done.

And you could. But can I be honest? You probably won’t. It’ll land in the “someday” pile with the other forty things. That’s not a knock on you – that’s just summer, and life.

But here’s the bigger reason I want us to do this TOGETHER instead of everyone reading alone. When you read something by yourself, you read it through the lens of what you already believe. You nod along at the parts that agree with you, and you slide right past the parts that poke at you. We ALL do it.

When you read it with other people – when someone in the group says, “okay wait, what did you make of THAT one?” – now you have to stop and actually sit with it. You can’t skim past the uncomfortable part. That right there is the difference between reading a research guide and being changed by one. Read it alone, you mostly confirm yourself. Read it together, you grow. And that’s the whole reason I host a book study every summer instead of just emailing you a link.

So here’s how it works, and I promise it’s simple. Three weeks. About one to two hours a week – that’s it, I’m not eating your whole summer. There’s a live Q&A each week, about an hour, if you want to talk it through with us – completely optional, and we record it. And the guide itself is a free download, so there’s nothing to buy.

To jump in, head to buildmathminds.com/bookstudy26 – I’ll drop that link in the show notes too.

This guide has been sitting out there since 2021 – free, with about the strongest research backing you’ll ever see on helping struggling math students – and most of our profession doesn’t even know it’s there. Let’s change that this summer. Together.

Go register: buildmathminds.com/bookstudy26.

Alright, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, I hope you’ll join me this summer to build your math mind so you can build the math minds of your students.