What Works Clearinghouse on CMP

CMP was found to have no discernible effects on math achievement.

Improvement index- 0 percentile points (average)

Read the full WWC report here.

Paul H on the toxic stew

more tales from the font:

Constructivism, as practiced by CMP is actually an amalgam of discovery learning, clothed in multiculturalism, with a dash of politically correct, story vignettes to 'connect' the child to real world problems. It's not that these things, in and of themselves are inappropriate, it's just that the program throws so much into a one day lesson, the math gets hijacked.

It's not atypical for one of these vignettes to have a dark skinned blue eyed child, named Ming lee, sitting in a wheel chair, talking in Spanish to her friend Sascha from Russia. Put that in front of a child who is reading at a third grade level as an introduction to a seventh grade lesson on solving proportions, and you have the makings of a nightmare. It's very hard at times to get by the intro.

Then when you get into the lesson's problem sets it is very often the case that the problems serve up a hodge-podge;fill out a table, look for a pattern, find equivalent fractions, make a graph, and on and on. It makes my head explode sometimes and I've been doing math forever.

I understand the need to make connections and provide spaced repetition but it should never get in the way of base understanding in the topic at hand. When it does, and the paradigm is discovery/group learning, the results are not pretty.

The math gets lost in a blizzard of roadblocks around; the weird names, and how come we saw that guy in the wheel chair last year, and are trees really alive, and why is the Chinese guy speaking Spanish to a Russian, do I really have to make a table, and on and on.

You mix this altogether and it's a toxic stew for behavior because each child is hung up on a different facet of the jewel. If you can't put all these fires out fast, really fast, the third of your class that is ADHD gets going with the third of the class that is laughing at the goofy names, while the last third passes notes about the day's scoop.

The math is lost. Instead of providing a structure to hang the practice and spaced reps upon, CMP rips the structure into tiny little pieces in the arcane hope that the kids will put it all together again.

C. and I used to laugh about the many and multi-splendored names of the children populating Saxon's word problems. The one I remember best was: Monifa.

Monifa?

Who in the world is named Monifa? (Apart from a pygmy hippo in Australia, that is.)

Of course today I wonder whether the choice of "Monifa" was John Saxon's little in-joke on multi-culturalism in math books.