Improve Math Performance and Test Scores in Los Angeles Unified

Does a parent helping their 10-year-old with their 5th-grade math homework sometimes end up being confused and getting the wrong answer to, say, a math word problem or a geometry task? More often than they’d like to admit. A teacher faces that challenge every time they prepare a class for their students and log in the hours needed to prepare the material and engage their students.

Every math teacher has to guide elementary school students as they develop foundational skills in math - from understanding fractions and operations to being introduced to critical skills through word problems like the ones parents often get confused by. And they have to differentiate their approach even as they prepare students for the same standardized tests.

When parents and teachers happen to be stakeholders in America’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified School District, the challenges of engaging around 450,000 students from diverse backgrounds and helping them keep up and advance in their math are considerable. It’s not just about how many students in Los Angeles Unified District there are, however. California’s Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are quite demanding, and students can sometimes struggle to stay ahead with the Los Angeles Unified School District curriculum. By 6th grade, they’re being introduced to algebraic thinking and they’ve already been doing geometry for a couple of years.

Further, the math curriculum has to be aligned to California Common Core State Standards across LAUD’s nearly 800 public schools in a district that extends from Marina del Rey to West Hollywood and all the way to Topanga in the Santa Monica mountains and also includes dozens of other communities. Additionally, teachers have to differentiate their math content to account for both advanced and struggling students. The district is enormous and the challenges are constant.

The Los Angeles Unified School District was founded in 1961 with the merger of the Los Angeles City School District and the Los Angeles City High School District. The Topanga School District was annexed the following year. Throughout the 60s and 70s LAUSD experienced the process of desegregation, finally reaching compliance in the mid 1980s with the California Supreme Court’s 1977 plan.

In the ‘90s LAUSD experimented with year-round schedules but public resistance to the idea eventually caused most LAUSD schools to return to regular schedules with summer holidays. From 2020 through 2023, various policies were put in place to deal with the COVID pandemic but by 2023 most requirements had been dropped, in part as a response to legal challenges.  

Class size is around 20 students per class with a student-teacher ratio of 19.66. The total number of teachers is just over 21,700, with elementary school teachers accounting for 12,700 of that total while high school teachers make up around 6,700. Kindergarten teachers total approximately 2,200. Other staff includes slightly more than 8,500 instructional aides as well as a little more than 1,700 guidance counselors and over 600 school psychologists.

The COVID pandemic meant schools had to adjust to online learning, giving teachers and students a whole new set of challenges. Fullerton School District, in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, was no exception. Remote learning meant supporting students below grade level (and keeping students above grade level engaged) was more important than ever. 

The 2019-2020 school year was cut short so students needed to build fact fluency and do their math practice and build their skills - often in a remote environment. As a result, differentiating across a range of individual skill levels among their math learners had to be done. 

Enter Prodigy, a learning platform that uses Prodigy Math to engage students and, perhaps just as importantly, provides teachers with reports on each student’s (and their class’) progress, all based on real-time data. The results for the 2019-2020 school year speak for themselves. 

Each month in Fullerton on Prodigy, on average for each student using Prodigy Math:

• 113 math questions were answered
• 11 math skills were mastered
• 86% of questions were answered correctly

Prodigy is a web-based digital learning platform which embeds math tasks and quizzes within an engaging online game students enjoy playing. It provides reports on students progress for teachers to use and to parents as well through the game’s dashboard. It can be played at home or at school on any device.

A key feature of Prodigy is that a student’s level is determined by the answers they give. The learning platform responds adaptively, giving each student an individualized pathway with skill-building math questions that challenge them while also encouraging them. Prodigy Math keeps them playing, answering, and building skills day after day, both in class and at home on their iPad, computer, or tablet.  

This really matters because math learning is cumulative and every task and test builds towards a fuller understanding of mathematics. It’s called depth of knowledge (DOK) and has 4 levels. For elementary school math, you normally only need to think about levels 1 through 3:

• DOK 1: Recall - can you remember what to do?
• DOK 2: Skill & Concept - can you decide how to solve the problem?
• DOK 3: Strategic Thinking - can you explain why you did what you did?

Thus the challenge for a teacher is keeping their math students engaged. As students move through Prodigy Math, they gain a better understanding of the mathematical concepts they need to know. Remember, if a student has trouble with math in their first years of elementary school, middle school math can become an even tougher challenge. A supportive game-based learning platform is essential in helping meet these challenges and ensuring that students don’t get left behind. 

Teachers realized that Prodigy Math helped them fill the gaps that students were facing, especially given the disruptions created by the COVID pandemic. More than this, they realized that this was a way to keep students engaged with their math practice, never an easy ask. Using Prodigy, several studies showed that:

• Students' enjoyment of math on average was shown to have improved after only a few months usage.
• The more students used Prodigy Math, the more their math scores were demonstrated on average to correlate with higher grades.
• A higher percentage of accurate answers to Prodigy Math questions tended to correlate to better scores in math exams.
• Students using the math game in public schools in a New Jersey study were shown on average to make significant progress adding math skills every month. 

Finally, progress monitoring with frequent reports through the Prodigy dashboard can help teachers to intervene and support math students in far more effective ways than is possible when not using digital game-based learning platforms. They are able to adjust their strategies based on the reports Prodigy provides them. And parents get to see their children’s progress in mastering new skills by using the parent dashboard and by receiving weekly reports.  

It should be clear by now, that with over 2 million active daily users, Prodigy Math is an engaging learning tool that, when used by educators, children and their parents, can turn math learning into a fun experience for the kids, rather than an anxiety-inducing chore.