Digital Math Practice

Boise State researchers are collaborating with Idaho schools to conduct a multi-year study funded by the Institute of Education Sciences to improve digital practice items for grade 6 students’ ratio and proportional reasoning.

Project Goals

• Study effects of enhancing the use of models and contexts in middle grades ratio, rate, and proportional reasoning practice items in the ASSISTments Digital Learning Platform.
• Explore ways to improve the design of items in digital learning platforms.
• Contribute to the scholarly knowledge base about how practice can support students’ conceptual and procedural knowledge of mathematics.

Digital Math Project Study 2: What We Did and What We Found

During the 2025-26 school year, nearly 3,000 6th grade students participated in a study practicing ratio and proportional reasoning problems using the digital math practice platform ASSISTments.

The study found that numbers in a problem strongly impact difficulty and providing visual models and scaffolds measurably supports students’ ability to solve a problem. These findings suggest that teachers can support students by deliberately increasing number complexity, using visual models to represent proportional relationships, and providing scaffolds that slowly fade as students develop familiarity with new models.

Project Team

• Michele Carney, Principal Investigator
• Joe Champion, Co-Principal Investigator
• Angela Crawford, Co-Principal Investigator
• Ya Mo, Co-Principal Investigator
• Patrick Lowenthal, Co-Principal Investigator
• Rachael Welder, Key Personnel
• Josie Derrick, Key Personnel

Complete OSF pre-registration at this link.