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Rice University School Mathematics Project
 

2012 Summer Campus ProgramRUSMP's Impact

• Over 8,000 teachers and 5,000 students have participated in RUSMP programs since 1987.

• Independent evaluations of RUSMP indicate that teachers who participated in the Summer Campus Program increased their mathematical knowledge and changed their beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics and their classroom practices to better align to the NCTM Standards. Furthermore, their students performed significantly better on standardized tests than comparable students whose teachers had not participated in the summer programs.

• Over 80 percent of elementary, intermediate, middle, and high school teachers participating in the 2009, 2010, or 2011 Summer Program consistently agreed they learned useful and interesting information that exposed to ideas about teaching mathematics and instructional practices that were new to them. There were statistically significant increases from pre-program to post-program in participating teachers’ preparedness to use a variety of methods to assess students’ mathematics knowledge, present applications of mathematical concepts, and use hands-on activities to introduce and develop math concepts.

• Stanford 10 mathematics scores in spring 2010 and 2011 indicate that after RUSMP participation, the mathematics knowledge of students of program participants increased significantly over the students’ prior year’s scores.

• Academic year classroom observations of elementary, intermediate, middle, and high school teachers who participated in the 2009, 2010, or 2011 Summer Program indicated that they consistently lead lessons that engaged in dialogue with students, integrated students’ affirmations and questions, encouraged students to explain how they reached their solutions, gave students adequate time to develop explanations of how they reached solutions, and provided students with adequate time for deeper thinking to construct their own explanations or solutions to problems.

• External evaluation of the NSF Mathematics Leadership Institute (2004-2010) found statistically significant gains in lead teachers’ knowledge of the content strands explored in the institute and statistically significant differences between lead teachers’ students’ and comparison students’ performances on the state-mandated mathematics assessment, except for one group of students. Interviews with administrators of lead teachers who participated in the institute have revealed sustained impacts of the institute on school-level and district-level collaborations among administrators and teachers, instructional planning, mathematics instruction, and professional development models.

• RUSMP’s impact on instruction and student achievement is the focus of an article in the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics Journal of Mathematics Education Leadership (Parr, Papakonstantinou, Schweingruber, & Cruz, 2004).

• RUSMP is spotlighted as an example of effective university/school district collaboration in the report Advanced Mathematics Educational Support: Resources and Recommendations for Higher Education Faculty Collaboration with Public Schools (Cannon, Parr, & Webb, 2003).

• RUSMP's Summer Campus Program was cited in What Works in the Elementary School: Results-Based Staff Development as one of top four mathematics professional development programs in the United States for its impact on student achievement in the elementary grades (Killion, 2002a).

• RUSMP's Summer Campus Program and the HISD’s Algebra Initiative (jointly planned and implemented by HISD and RUSMP) were cited in What Works in the High School: Results-Based Staff Development as the top two mathematics professional development programs in the United States for their impact on student achievement in the high school grades (Killion, 2002b, 2002c).

• RUSMP was highlighted in the report Identifying High-Performing Texas Schools and Their Methods of Success in Middle School Math and Algebra I End-of-Course Performance (Toenjes & Garst, 2001) written by request for the Texas Education Agency.

• RUSMP was cited in What Works in the Middle: Results-Based Staff Development as one of the top seven professional development programs in mathematics in the United States for its impact on student achievement in the middle grades (Killion, 1999).