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The Impact of MMP School Involvement on Student Achievement

Abstract

This paper addresses the following claim(s):

"The MMP is a mature project that is now in its seventh year. As this partnership moves into a new phase of sustainability, as one that is financially supported by state and district funds, as well as NSF funds, as opposed to one that is only supported by NSF funds, it is important to continuously reinforce the claim that school-level involvement in the MMP is a critical factor for promoting student achievement gains. The current work examined the level of school involvement in key MMP-sponsored activities over a four year period and identified schools that had high, medium, low, and no involvement. MMP involvement was measured by adding two scores - one that quantified the attendance of the school's MTL at monthly professional development meetings, and one that quantified staff participation in UWM courses designed to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics. Specifically, the first score was calculated by summing the percentage of MTL meetings that were attended by at least one representative from 2005 to 2008. The second score was created by summing the number of teachers at a school who took at least one course at UWM, the average number of courses taken per teacher at a school, and the average credits earned by a teacher at a school. This computation resulted in higher scores for schools that had many teachers taking one course and lower scores for schools in which only a few teachers took many courses.

UWM mathematics educators and mathematicians were closely involved in all aspects of the development and presentation of both the MTL meetings and the UWM courses; this involvement was one of the factors which led us to hypothesize that student achievement growth over the four year period would be greater for schools that had higher MMP Involvement scores."