Eric.ed.gov – Evaluating the Promise of the “FUSION” Tier 2 Math Intervention

The low level of mathematics performance of U.S. students in relation to national standards and in international comparisons has concerned educators and policy makers for many years. The authors’ primary goals were to design a feasible and usable intervention and gather data on the promise of the intervention to foster students’ conceptual understanding of whole number concepts and skills and procedural fluency. The FUSION curriculum was developed using an iterative design process aligned with design experiment methodology. The pilot study took place in nine schools in two suburban school districts in the northwest. The FUSION program is a Grade 1 (Tier 2) mathematics intervention that focuses specifically on building students’ early knowledge of whole number concepts. Results indicate that understanding student outcomes, program implementation fidelity, and interventionists’ perceptions of–and reactions to–the intervention has been a crucial piece of the iterative design process. The Pilot Study results revealed differential effects for proximal and distal outcomes and the degree to which measured outcomes align with teachers’ perceptions of the program’s utility. The authors state that their results and the resulting conversations will be useful to the team as they move forward with other curricula design and implementation efforts and as they finalize plans to propose–and conduct–a subsequent FUSION efficacy study.