In 2012, roughly 50% of Florida’s high school students were proficient in Algebra 1, with proficiency rates under 20% in some districts¹. Responding to the need to significantly improve Algebra 1 achievement in Florida, the UF Lastinger Center for Learning partnered with a local technology company, Study Edge, to launch a statewide initiative, Math Nation (formerly known as Algebra Nation).
The result was a social-media-based, easy-to-navigate, online tutoring platform for middle and high school students; and a resource for teachers to help them differentiate instruction to meet their students’ unique learning needs, speeds and preferences. Within four months, more than half of Florida’s middle and high school algebra teachers, representing 1,200 schools in all 67 school districts, had accessed these quality resources.
Improving student outcomes
Over the last 10 years, the Lastinger Center and its research partners have evaluated the effectiveness of Math Nation and found that schools that used Math Nation at a higher rate had an average Algebra 1 End of Course exam passing rate of 83%, a 20-point higher average than low-using schools’ rate of 63%². As a result, Math Nation kept expanding and now serves more than 950,000 students and 30,000 teachers per year across 26 states.
Partnering for greater impacts
Understanding that every state has a different need for mathematics education, Math Nation is intended to be customizable. Math Nation curriculum offers comprehensive, standards-aligned instructional support and resources for sixth- to eighth-grade math, Algebra 1, Geometry and Algebra 2. Additionally, the content is available in English, Spanish and Haitian-Creole, and can be accessed by any internet-connected device. Florida, Michigan, Mississippi and South Carolina have funded access and standards-aligned content. Alabama and Louisiana will be the next states to join Math Nation.
In 2022, Math Nation received top scores as an approved publisher for K-12 Instructional Materials Mathematics Adoption in the state of Florida, which meant that Math Nation’s impact would expand beyond its original supplemental tutoring model and could be implemented directly into classroom instruction over the next five years. Since the approval, 29 districts and schools across the state of Florida have planned to adopt Math Nation as their primary curriculum for at least one subject area for the 2022-2023 school year.
Math Nation recently joined the suite of STEMscopes curriculum and products with Accelerate Learning, creating an opportunity to even further extend its reach.
As Math Nation develops and grows, it will continue to implement the input that teachers, professors, administrators, families, and students provide to make the content stronger; and it will continue seeking partnerships with other states to expand its impact on student learning outcomes.
To learn more about Math Nation, visit mathnation.com.
References
1. Florida Department of Education. (2012). Statewide Comparison of Algebra 1 EOC Assessment Scores.
2. Collier, Z. & Leite, W. (2017). A comparison of three-step approaches for auxiliary variables in latent class and latent profile analysis, structural equation modeling.
