Lipscomb receives nearly $1 million from state for summer math institute

A valuable math teacher training program at Lipscomb University that is working to help Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools boost its students’ math test scores will be expanded in 2009 thanks to a state grant totaling almost $1 million.

For three years, Lipscomb has held the SEE-Math Workshop, a two-week intensive training for math teachers in Davidson County and other high-need school systems in Middle Tennessee.

 

SEE-Math (Student Engagement in Exploring Math) focuses on making math relatable and fun for students, featuring hands-on activities such as origami, painting stained glass windows, shooting off rockets, measuring the Allen Bell Tower, calculating the angles at the Parthenon and plenty of visually-based computer software.

 

Around 80 teachers from the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools have attended the workshop in the last three years, and this past August the school system reported an 11 percentage point jump in math proficiency scores among its students.

 

SEE-Math has been funded by a 2006 Tennessee Math and Science Partnership Grant originally intended to be a total of $240,000 over three years. But the program proved so popular among the local school districts, that the state eventually awarded Lipscomb almost $600,000 to conduct the workshop for high school teachers through summer 2009.

 

On Monday, Governor Phil Bredesen and Education Commissioner Timothy Webb announced a new round of Math and Science Partnership Grants, and this time Lipscomb was awarded a $300,000-per-year, three-year grant to hold a SEE-Math Workshop for middle school teachers beginning in the summer 2009.

 

In addition, Lipscomb will use the grant to conduct research on the effectiveness of the program, said Ben Hutchinson, dean of the Lipscomb College of Natural and Applied Sciences. The university will document the math proficiency scores of students taught by a control group of math teachers who have not attended the SEE-Math program and compare those scores to those of students whose teachers have completed the SEE-Math program. The next year, the control group of teachers gets to attend SEE-Math and Lipscomb professors will look for any improvement in their students’ scores after they complete the workshop.

 

According to Dr. Candice McQueen, Lipscomb's dean of the College of Education and the internal evaluator of the SEE-Math workshop, testing has shown that the program has significant impact on the teacher participants' math content knowledge.

 

"In addition, we have been able to show, although with a small sample size, that there is some positive impact on the math achievement of the students in these teachers' classes," she said. "We hope to show this on a larger scale in an more distinct experimental approach with the new grant award over the next three years." 

 

There is already some national evidence that intensive teacher institutes in math are highly effective. The National Science Foundation, which funds the Math and Science Partnership Grants in 52 partnerships across the nation, reported in May that:

 

Part of the effectiveness is the universities’ ability to respond directly to a specific school system’s needs. For example, in 2007 Lipscomb’s SEE-Math added a program in teaching calculus, at the request of the schools, said Carroll Wells, Lipscomb chair of the math department and coordinator of SEE-Math. In 2008 the workshop added methods to help teachers prepare students for the math portion of the ACT, a major concern in Davidson County this past year.

 

Math proficiency is expected to be one of the deciding factors in determining Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools’ No Child Left Behind status.

 

Now the state has enacted new math requirements for K-12 students, including more stringent requirements at the middle school level. So in summer 2009, SEE-Math will be geared toward middle school teachers, helping them introduce geometry, algebra and statistics to younger students, said Wells.

 

“Many middle school teachers have only two or three courses in math (on their transcripts),” said Wells, so SEE-Math will teach them problem-solving skills through a murder mystery dinner. Participants will be introduced to Cabri Jr., a software application for calculators. Geometry terms will be reinforced by an origami exercise that uses 91 different geometric concepts, he said.

 

SEE-Math is conducted by the Lipscomb College of Natural and Applied Sciences and the College of Education.

 

SEE-Math participants head back to the classroom with more than $500 in resources, from computer programs to textbooks to visual aids, Wells said. This has proven to be one of the most popular aspects of the program, which has no problem filling up each year. Teachers also meet twice more during the year to discuss use of the hands-on teaching methods in the classroom and any problems they have faced.

 

In addition to the state grant, Lipscomb University offers up to $100,000 per year in tuition discounts to teachers who enroll in SEE-Math and wish to use the experience as part of a graduate course at the university, Hutchinson said. In total, the university will offer up to $1.2 million worth of teacher education free to instructors in Davidson and other counties over the next three years.

 

On Monday, the state announced $6.37 million worth of Math and Science Partnership Grants to be awarded to five universities over the next three years. The five universities, including Lipscomb, will serve 33 school districts in the state with math and science teacher institutes.

 

“Educators know better than anyone that learning never stops, particularly when it comes to finding the best way to teach students emerging skills,” said Education Commissioner Timothy Webb. “These partnerships provide valuable educator professional development to the school systems where students need it the most.”