Qualitative Factors that I Like:
-Sufficient sufficient fluency work

-The grade 6 curriculum included statistics

-A healthy blend of word problems and fluency instruction 

-The program includes direct instruction components

-Most of the program components are free

Qualitative Factors that I Dislike:

-Word problems are two steps by grade 3. This seems inappropriately complex. 

-Unit conversions are started in grade 4, this seems early

-Multi digit division in grade 4, this seems early 

-Fractions operations in grade 4, this seems early

-Grade 5 curriculum introduces cartesian planes with word problems, before it introduces plotting. 

-Algebra does not enter the curriculum before grade 6

-Not enough fractions instructions in the later grades

-Exponents are not introduced until grade 8

-Integers are not introduced until grade 8

Overall Impressions:

I was worried this program would have insufficient fluency instruction. However, I found the program to have a normal amount of fluency practice. That being said, much of the fluency work questions were phrased to help develop the students' math meta-cognition strategies, as well as their conceptual knowledge. However, personally I felt this sometimes made questions confusing and needlessly complex. Fluency practice is supposed to help students build computational and procedural automaticity. However, I worry that because the fluency questions were convoluted that it raised the potential to diminish the returns of the fluency work. For example, pre-algebra questions were phrased like: write three expressions that can = 12+3. The goal of this type of instruction is to help students to realize that the = sign actually means equivalent and not solve. However, I would argue that the more traditional method still achieves the same goal and does so in a less open-ended way. 

Overall, I found the curriculum was too limited and that the scaffolding was for some strands too slow, while for others too fast. Personally, I would have liked to see a more spiraled curriculum, in which the same concepts were reviewed in every grade, but in increasing difficulties. 

Research Base:

To the best of my knowledge there are no peer reviewed meta-analyses or studies on Eureka Math. The company does have 36 data reports listed on their website, which amount to essentially non peer reviewed case studies. I conducted a statistical analysis of these case studies to try to assess the efficacy of the program. However, I want to make several caveats to this analysis. Firstly, all of this research is compiled and published by the company, without peer review. Which means there is likely to be sponsorship bias, as there is nothing stopping the company from withholding all negative data and only posting their positive data. Secondly, not only is their data not peer reviewed, but neither is this analysis. Thirdly, there were many anomalies in this research, which were not necessarily malicious, but still limited the overall validity of the data for the purposes of establishing efficacy. 

In total there were 36 case studies. Of these 36 case studies, 17 reported enough data, for me to calculate a statistical difference, with a mean total difference of 18.91%; however, 3 of these studies posted extreme outlier data, with a mean difference of more than 40%.If we correct for these outliers, we get a mean difference of 9.69%, which is not a particularly meaningful difference. 

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