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By far competitions have the greatest impact on growth (including for girls) and offer the best challenges for gifted students.
That's a very interesting comment. Can you pinpoint what exactly it is about it that has the greatest impact on growth?
I was interested in this comment as well and would like to see the research it is based on. (Sorry--that sounds combative! I don't mean it as such. Genuinely curious.)
My statement wasn’t based on research, and I haven’t actually looked for any, but I would be interested if anyone else has found some. I suspect that the nature of the problems (more discreet math and non-routine problems) and student collaboration during practice is what lead to the impact we saw, but I couldn't say for sure. My claim about growth was based on data we looked at, however.
At the end of the 2012-13 school year, the teacher I worked with compared data she collected on the two enrichment programs that ran for most of the school year, ALEKS and MOEMS. In the ALEKS program, students met three times per week for 30 minutes each session and could work at home online for additional time. In MOEMS, students met once a week for 40 minutes and were given problems to work on at home. In MOEMS sessions, students prepared for the five MOEMS contests. After the contests were over, we continued to have enrichment sessions such as game sessions and proof writing sessions.
The teacher I work with wanted to look at the impact the programs had on student growth measured by the Ohio Achievement Assessments because value-added is an important measure in teacher evaluations here. What she found was that the ALEKS program had no impact on growth for students at any level. However, MOEMS had a significant impact on growth for students at all levels, including gifted students. This year the teacher who took over teaching the fifth grade gifted cluster from her was concerned because he wasn’t seeing the growth in gifted students that she had seen last year. The few students showing significant growth were participating in MOEMS, but we have far fewer students from that cluster participating this year. As a result, he will be working with the program next year, hoping that teacher involvement will increase the number of students involved.
The other data we looked at was AMC 8 scores from last year and this year. Students who participated in MOEMS last year had an average increase of 7.5 points on the AMC 8 this year. Students who didn’t participate in MOEMS last year had an average 1.2 point increase in their AMC 8 scores.
