Limestone County School District is a rural school district in Athens, Alabama. The district includes 6 elementary schools and 7 secondary schools with a current enrollment of over 8,900 students in Grades Pre-K–12. The professional staff includes 600 teachers.
Eighty-two percent of the students are White, and the remaining student body consists of students identified as Black (9%), Hispanic (7%), or other (2%). Forty-seven percent of the students qualify for free/reduced-price lunch and 10% of the students have an Individualized Education Program (IEP).
Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test (ARMT) is taken by all public school students, Grades 3-8, in the spring. The test covers reading and mathematics. The test measures how well students acquire the skills and knowledge described in the Alabama Content Standards.
At Grades 3–5, students must take Stanford 10 Mathematics procedures, mathematics Problem Solving, and the ARMT Part 2 Mathematics subtest to get an ARMT mathematics score. The math ARMT comprises multiple choice and open-ended items covering five domains: Numbers and Operations, Algebra, Geometry, Measurement, and Data Analysis and Probability.
In Alabama, students’ test scores can be categorized into one of four levels of mastery including Level 1 (Does not meet), Level 2 (Partially meets), Level 3 (Meets), and Level 4 (Exceeds). Students scoring at the top two levels (Meets and Exceeds) are classified as excelling on the Alabama math standards.
To determine if HMH GO Math! had an impact on learning, students’ ARMT mathematics test scores from the spring of 2011, prior to using the program, and the spring of 2012, after one year of usage, were obtained for Grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. These findings are presented in Figure 1.
The comparison of achievement scores revealed that at all grade levels examined, the percentage of students scoring at Exceeds or higher was greater in 2012, after using GO Math!, than the previous year with an average gain of over 4%.
This one-year examination of the implementation of GO Math! © 2012 at Limestone County School District revealed that the program was associated with increased mathematics achievement.