Research

The WWC did not identify any additional studies on The Expert Mathematician for the updated review. One study (Baker, 1997) was a randomized controlled trial that met WWC evidence standards under the original review and met WWC evidence standards under the updated review. The study examined the impact of The Expert Mathematician on students’ mathematics achievement.

Baker (1997) included 90 students who were randomly assigned to either The Expert Mathematician (n = 45) or Transition Math (n = 45) curriculum. Differences in a math pretest, administered at the start of the school year, favored students in the two Transition Math classrooms, who scored 5.3 points higher on average than students in the two Expert Mathematician classrooms. The math pretest instrument was administered as a posttest at the end of the school year. Seventy students completed both pre- and posttests. Attrition rates were similar for the intervention and comparison groups. In addition, the pretest was used as a covariate in the posttest analyses, and therefore controlled for post-attrition differences (on the pretest) between the two groups.