I’ve been making arguments for some time about the power of a play-based approach to teaching and earning mathematics in elementary school.

There are a lot of signs pointing to the value of this approach. The power of play and its connection to learning are well understood to be essential in Pre-K and Kindergarten. And a lot that play offers – choice, autonomy, engagement, fun – meshes with what we know about how older kids learn too. And when the program is thoughtfully designed, we should expect that play actually leads to opportunities for deeper and more rigorous mathematics.

What we want in addition to our theory of learning is evidence that it works in action.

Fortunately, I received some evidence to this effect earlier this year. The executive director of a summer program reached out to let us know that they’d been seeing excellent results since they switched to the Math for Love Summer Curriculum.

Prior to switching to our curriculum, they’d see student growth of 7-8 weeks of growth in a 6-week program, as measured by the STAR assessments.

After they switched to Math for Love, they began to see growth of 12 – 14 weeks of growth in the same 6-week period, as measured by the same STAR assessments.

(This was for students in grades 3 – 5 in Horizons at Episcopal Academy. If anyone wants to dive into the data, I’m happy to share it. Just shoot me an email.)

If you’ve experienced a play-based approach to learning math yourself, you probably expect a well-designed play-based program to lead to greater student affinity for math, a greater sense of self-efficacy, and to students and teachers having a better time. But we should also expect it to lead to more positive outcomes on standard measures!

I hope that we can continue to gather soft and hard data to tear down an old dichotomy that math is disjoint from joy, and that we can learn math only when we’re suffering appropriately. I’m convinced that a play-based approach is an incredibly effective way to learn math, and that mathematics is in a deeper way than we commonly understand animated by play.

The data helps to make the next necessary argument: that with proper materials and support, teachers can employ a play-based approach successfully and students can benefit.