Over the past decade many school districts across the country have centered their efforts to improve teachers’ mathematics instruction and students’ mathematics achievement on the adoption and use of instructional materials well aligned to state standards and tests. These efforts have been facilitated by the emergence of well-designed instructional materials. Yet instructional materials do not stand alone: they must be carefully aligned with other elements of practice and policy at the district and school level to provide teachers with the coherent instructional guidance and support needed to bring the vision of improvement to fruition. In a previous study, we found that districts across the country are increasingly making centralized, district-level decisions about mathematics instructional materials—with the intention that all teachers in all schools will use those materials. The district-wide decision to implement new instructional materials has significant implications at the school level requiring support from principals, teachers, and other school staff to be implemented effectively and successfully.

We will report on an ongoing NSF-funded study investigating the implementation of mathematics instructional materials. In this study, we employ a concurrent triangulation, mixed-methods, multi-level longitudinal design to study 12 school districts’ implementation of two elementary mathematics programs Everyday Mathematics and Investigations in Number, Data and Space. Although we will primarily focus on school-level supports in this session the overall study is examining the relationships among the district-level supports of implementation, the school-level supports for implementation, the school-level use of the materials, and the effects on student outcomes. We expect that district level of support for implementation, when paired with support for implementation at the school level, will result in greater use of the instructional materials at the classroom level. That higher level of use of the materials – in particular, of materials that are aligned with state standards and measures and consistent across classrooms and grade levels – may result in increases in student performance on the mathematics portions of the relevant state tests. Conversely, we would expect that a low level of support from the district and the school for implementation would be more likely to be correlated with a low level of use at the classroom level and, therefore, less likely to have a positive effect on student outcomes.

Our data collection methods include the use of surveys, interviews, and site visits. Classroom teachers in the schools in our sample are surveyed four times over the school year about their use of Investigations or Everyday Mathematics and their perceptions of school- and district-level support. Principals were surveyed twice; assistant principals and math support personnel were each surveyed once. District-level administrators were interviewed in all sites; in each, we spoke with both a mathematics administrator (for example, an elementary mathematics coordinator) and an administrator in the supervisory line (with responsibility for evaluating principals). A subset of teachers and school-level administrators were also interviewed to establish triangulation with the survey data and to investigate explanations for patterns of interest. Data collection is complete for our cohort 1 sample of 6 districts, 69 schools, and 1,030 teachers.  Sixteen schools (23% of our cohort 1 sample) participated in the additional teacher and principal interviews.

In this session, we will engage with the quantitative and qualitative data we have collected from cohort 1, specifically drawing on qualitative data from our subsample of schools in which we interviewed teachers and principals. In the first 30 minutes we will present the theoretical framework and the key dimensions of the design of the project and then focus on the dimension of school-level support. We will present the key components of school level of support that we have identified including: accountability and monitoring; principal support and stance towards the materials; support from coach or other specialist; support from colleagues; and minimal distracters or competing school-level initiatives. During the rest of the work session (60 minutes), participants will delve deeply into the qualitative and quantitative data from two schools that present different profiles of school level of use. We will work with excerpts from transcripts from the teacher and principal interviews, as well as quantitative data from those schools that relate to the school level of support. Participants will discuss and debate the following central questions:

1. What are the key components of school-level support for mathematics instructional materials?
2. Given these components, how would we define the school level of support measured qualitatively for the two example schools?
3. Given these components, how would we define the school level of support measured quantitatively for the two example schools?
4. What patterns do we see between the qualitative and quantitative data for these two schools? On what components does the data converge or diverge?

Participants will analyze project data in order to refine and revise our conceptual definition of school level of support. Participants will also consider the mixed methods nature of our project and discuss areas of convergence and divergence between the qualitative and quantitative data.