Cognition Research in Practice: Engineering and Evaluating a Middle School Math Curriculum

How can research findings from cognitive and learning sciences be meaningfully applied in authentic settings to improve student learning outcomes in mathematics? Decades of basic research on how people learn has implications for the design of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. However, bringing research to practice involves simultaneously applying multiple design principles and raises pragmatic challenges of classroom contexts. Our project used research-based recommendations to systematically revise a widely used middle school mathematics curriculum and investigated whether the revised curriculum improved student learning in mathematics. In this article, we detail a replicable process for operationalizing and implementing multiple research-based principles and report findings from a large-scale experimental evaluation of this approach to estimate the potential impact on student learning.