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Students entering 5th grade see dramatic gains using FogStone Isle

Math Enrichment
3 min read

Cignition performed its first efficacy study with Math Enrichment, an organization that runs summer schools for approximately 1000 students in the San Francisco Bay Area. That study focused on rising 5th graders (i.e., transitioning from 4th to 5th grade). They used our fractions operations package, focusing on fraction addition/subtraction with unlike denominators and fraction multiplication - material those students had not been previously exposed to.

Math Enrichment enrolls approximately 1000 students for a 4 week summer school program in the San Francisco Bay Area. The students cover a range, from those requiring remedial work in mathematics to those who are in summer school because they are ambitious to get a head start on the following school year’s material.

Math Enrichment deployed Cignition’s FogStone Isle at Carolyn Clark Elementary School, which included 75 rising 5th graders, during the summer of 2016. The students used the FogStone Isle fractions package to learn the fraction operations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication, as a head start for 5th grade (those operations are part of the Common Core State Standards for 5th grade, with some introductory material in 4th grade).

Efficacy Test

A test of efficacy was performed to measure the results of FogStone Isle for teaching fraction addition, subtraction, and multiplication to rising 5th graders. Note that this is mostly new material for rising 5th graders.

The goals of the study included:

  • Measure learning efficacy for the FogStone Isle fraction package for rising 5th graders in the Math Enrichment summer program.
  • Measure transfer of learning to new fraction material outside of the game environment. Pretests and posttests were based on textbook problems and Common Core exam problems.

Two tests, A and B, were created, based on textbook and Common Core exam questions. A random 50% of students received test A as a pretest and test B as a posttest. The other 50% received test B as a pretest and test A as a posttest. This enabled us to make sure any differences between the A and B tests did not bias the results.

Pretests were administered at the beginning of the summer, prior to any use of FogStone. Posttests were administered at the end of week 4 of summer school.

Results

  • The total number of students tested was 75 (N = 75)
  • Average score on pretest was 40% correct
  • Average score on post test was 71% correct
  • + 31% abs score difference

T-Tests, p < 0.01, significant improvement

Effect size, Cohen’s d measure 1.00, large effect size