Approximately 20 additional field test sites are needed for the iPad eScreener application and a potential eMonitor application. Field sites will receive the applications at no cost and must simply send us an email certifying that you have iPads to collect data with. No additional requirements are necessary. Please contact us as soon as possible to indicate a willingness to be a field test site.

Our eScreener is in beta development, thanks to those of you who signed up to request the eScreener. We hope that the beta process will take just a short time and will be releasing it slowly (and for free) to our members who already sent in their intent. The likely launch date for the fully functional eScreener-K will be the summer of 2011. However, we have GREAT NEWS! We have finished a round of development and will make the eNumeracy ENSI-Kindergarten and ENSI-First Grade Screening Inventories available to school districts, teachers, and schools in kit format. Please take time to read more about the ENSI-KSI and the FGSI.

Thanks for all your recent work taking the eNumeracy eScreener poll. This helped the development team target the software to your needs. We have decided to release the Kindergarten eScreener, Beta Version, for the iPad (www.apple.com/ipad).

The majority of eNumeracy users are still PC and laptop users, but an unexpected percentage of users (30%) appear to be using the iPad or anticipate using the iPad. Personally, I have found the iPad to be very user friendly and a potentially excellent data collection tool. We are designing the eScreener to collect data within minutes and display the data to you as teachers.

Check out the Discuss page. A teacher in NY State reported the success of screening with the AIMSweb Number ID measure and I replied with a cautionary note.

Another exciting conference for RtI in North Carolina! Thanks to Dr. Tom Jenkins for hosting a truly innovative and empowering conference with some of the top scholars in the business! Attached are my updated presentation slides from the Wilmington conference at the Sunspree Resort in October, 2009. These slides, in Adobe .pdf format (will require an updated Acrobat reader), are available on the resources page.

These are the color presentation slides from the Asheville network meeting on 3/26/09 in .pdf format.

Today, I thought of a quote from Thoreau's Walden. In his discussion of economics (essentially - resource allocation in society), he writes,

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."

Visit our Forum to read more or post comments!

Here are the powerpoint slides detailing the results of a Tier II kindergarten intervention presented at the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) Annual Convention in Boston. It is a .pdf file. When you see a callout box in the top left hand corner of the slide, click on it to access the note pages for the slide on which it appears.

School-based research in early numeracy intervention and assessment talk about important outcomes of math success such as enhancing graduation rates, grades, and later earning power. One of the neglected outcomes of numeracy that deserves more attention is the link between early numeracy and health outcomes.

The U.S. Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance released a user friendly guide for schools who want to adopt research-based instructional programs / materials / curricula.

This Guide seeks to provide educational practitioners with user-friendly tools to distinguish practices supported by rigorous evidence from those that are not.

Dr. Scott Methe created this "talking points" paper that outlines some key connections between Curriculum-Based Evaluation (CBE) in math and intervention in early numeracy. I gave a variation of this talk to the Innovations Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah (an amazing city!) on 9/12/08.

"I have learned about CBE as a systematic way of inquiring into what a student knows. More specifically, CBE allows a practitioner to examine a student’s prior knowledge in terms of what that student is able to do in response to instructional stimuli. Personally, I think that we need to see through and around the details that may be confusing for us and focus on some simple ideas."

Dr. Scott Methe created a powerpoint presentation, "Response to Intervention & Research-Based Tiered Math Instruction", for his talk at North Carolina Innovations at the Holiday Inn Sunspree in Wilmington, September 9, 2008.

Here is an 8-week intervention program which is a combination of early math instructional standards, the NC Standard Course of Study, and Level A of the Numberworlds curriculum from SRA.

This past year has allowed me to get caught up. Here is a paper about “Informed Intervention in Early Mathematics” for school psychologists, published in the School Psychology Forum. Here is another paper on Early Numeracy Skill Indicators (featuring the OPF measure on this site) that finally made it to School Psychology Review.

What? Big Ideas in Beginning Mathematics? Examine some tables discussing this idea to complement Big Ideas in Beginning Reading. We ask that if you reference the current information, please either quote Clements, Sarama, & DiBiase (2004) or Methe & Riley-Tillman (in press). The Clements et al. text is the original theoretical model and the Methe & Riley-Tillman paper was the first in school psychology journals to target and summarize these specific ideas.

The North Carolina State Improvement Project II recently sponsored a Network Meeting in Atlantic Beach, NC. The Keynote address featured Dr. Douglas Clements, one of the leading experts in early mathematics instruction and assessment, and a key member of the National Math Advisory Panel. Dr. Douglas H. Clements has published over 100 refereed research studies, 8 books, 50 chapters, and 200 additional publications in the areas of mathematics education, educational technology, and early childhood education