Two UC Davis School of Education professors have been awarded a $3 million federal grant for a five-year project designed to help K-12 teachers increase student success in math.

Professors Jamal Abedi and Paul Heckman received the grant from the National Science Foundation for research that will explore so-called formative assessments of students’ grasp of math lessons. Abedi is the principal investigator and Heckman the co-investigator on the study that will begin next month.

While standardized tests typically measure math skills near the end of a school year, formative assessments are done throughout or at certain points during a course to gauge how well students are grasping the material. This allows teachers to make adjustments midstream as necessary rather than arriving at the end of a quarter or semester only to discover that some students have gotten lost along the way.

“We do this study to help teachers utilize the great potentials that formative assessments have in understanding students’ needs and in improving curriculum and instructional practices,” Abedi said. “We also want to provide teachers with a model of formative assessment that is sound for their future use.”

The research will be conducted in four phases, starting with a statewide survey of assessments and practices now used by K-12 math teachers. In the second phase, based on the survey, assessments used at 120 schools with large minority enrollments will be analyzed for validity, reliability and how well they serve minority students.

After that, the project will attempt to develop a formative assessment prototype that can be used by districts throughout California and the nation. The final phase will field-test, refine and standardize the prototype.

The study was inspired by the importance of learning mathematics in an increasingly complex world and California students’ poor math scores, which ranked in the bottom third in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments.