Description:

The Jump program is described by its creators as,  “JUMP Math’s distinctive, agile approach focuses not only on what students learn, but how they learn it. It has been developed through extensive research and experience working with children. Unlike teaching methods that rely on textbooks, rote learning or memorization, our approach helps children overcome “math anxiety” by building their confidence and resilience through tackling incrementally more challenging concepts at each stage of learning. This leads to success at understanding math – not just memorizing concepts.” 

Principles: 

The Jump website lists the following principles as being key to their program:

“Teachers guide students to discover math concepts in gradual, scaffolded lessons.

Students gain confidence by engaging with & mastering concepts throughout each lesson.

This process helps teachers assess each student’s learning.

And prepares students to move on to the next connected lesson.”

I interpreted this to mean the program is focused on conceptual learning, individualization, and logical scaffolding. All of these ideas are important. However, I see no mention of developing procedural or computational fluency, within their marketing material which worries me. However, users do appear to believe the program provides enough fluency work. Unfortunately, the Jump curriculum is not publicly available, nor are there resource samples publicly available, at least not without signing a lengthy contract with the company, which limit my ability to qualitatively review this product. I will update this review in future, if I have access to their materials. 

Ultimately, I do not think a qualitative analysis of Jump Math can be easily given, because the program offers so little information online. That being said, I feel comfortable saying the program is conceptually focused.

Research:

There have been 13 studies conducted on Jump Math. However, only two of them were of high enough quality to evaluate the efficacy of the program. I as only able to find the results for one of those two studies. 

A randomized control trial,  conducted by Solomon T, Dupuis, Et al, and published in 2019. This study was sponsored by Sick Kids Hospital. This study had 273 grade 5 students, lasted 5 months and used a WJ-III assessment. The results of which can be seen in the below graph. 

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