NSF FF: Planning: Supporting Evidence-Based Education to Scale Tier 2 Math Intervention in K-8 Schools

Award ID: 2627548

This FINDERS Foundry award develops an app to support educators who provide targeted, small group intervention in K-8 mathematics education. The app increases educator capacity, improve fidelity of research-backed math intervention, and ultimately support stronger learning outcomes for K-8 students identified through universal screening. The planning work will directly involve educators, students receiving support, and parents whose children receive intervention, ensuring that decisions about what the app shows teachers, stores, and shares with families reflect parent concerns about privacy, communication, and progress reports. The project is designed as a scalable model for translating evidence-based math intervention into everyday school practice. This FINDERS Foundry award collaboratively explores the use of language models to make low-stakes, student-specific formative and diagnostic inferences aligned to the Multi Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). Prioritizing a sequence of evidence-based activities from a curated library, educators are provided with productive instructional moves while preserving educator interactional authority and instructional judgment. The intervention library draws from practice guides across systematic instruction, mathematical language, representations including number lines, and conceptual analysis of word problems. The session structure is based on high-dosage tutoring, identified as an effective intervention for struggling learners. By scaffolding interventions and progress monitoring educators are able to support higher fidelity implementation. The project advances the application of new technology to support STEM teaching and learning. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Lindsay Portnoy