Our Collaborative Approach

EF skills are foundational for success in school and life. They help students hold information in mind, ignore distractions, and switch strategies to solve problems.

Before EF+Math, research consistently showed strong links between EF and math learning, but few curricula or classroom products explicitly integrated opportunities for students to develop these skills while learning math. The EF interventions that did exist showed mixed results in improving math outcomes, and those with the most promise were often hard to implement in real classrooms and rarely designed with Black and Latino students or students experiencing poverty in mind.

EF+Math set out to change this. The program created a collaborative space to study the relationship between EF skills and math learning and to design ways of integrating EF skill development into students’ math learning experiences in real-world classrooms. Our portfolio of interdisciplinary R&D teams generated new knowledge around the role of context in shaping how students engage EF skills and built interventions that honored students’ cultural knowledge, affirmed their identities as math learners, and reflected the realities of diverse classrooms. In creating these interventions, EF+Math championed the idea that EF skills are a core asset all students bring to rigorous math learning. EF+Math’s work highlights that high-quality math curricula and products must attend to students’ EF skills and how students perceive their math learning experience, including how they feel about math and themselves as math learners.

To make progress in this emerging space, EF+Math used a collaborative Portfolio Approach to invest in a complementary set of R&D teams that could both build classroom products and generate new research insights and tools. We funded the development of seven math learning products, with three advancing to large-scale evaluations across 90+ schools and 10,000+ students. These include Fraction Ball, CueThinkEF+, and MathFluency+, each showing promising evidence of improving math learning, engagement, and students’ confidence as math learners.

Alongside math product development, EF+Math funded the development of new tools to better understand and support students’ EF skills while they learn math. Our portfolio of R&D teams also developed 23 measures aimed at gathering more asset-based and contextualized information about student learning across our focus areas.

To manage this ambitious R&D portfolio, EF+Math introduced Active Management — close partnerships between the EF + Math Program Team and each R&D team. The Program Team provided coaching and consistent guidance around centering equity via our model of inclusive R&D and accountability. This support kept the portfolio of R&D teams aligned with program goals while adapting to school and classroom realities — resulting in both usable products for classrooms and the collective advancement of the EF and math education research fields.

EF+Math’s approach was grounded in Inclusive R&D — an equity-focused process that centered Black and Latino students, students experiencing poverty, educators, families, and communities. This model elevated educator and student voice, ensuring new products and resources were both effective and affirming of students’ cultural knowledge, identities, and lived experiences.

Collectively, our work generated products, knowledge, measures, and tools that expanded the field’s capacity to create transformative math learning experiences for students and to conduct more equitable and actionable R&D.

Through this collaborative approach, EF+Math:

• Advanced scientific knowledge at the intersection of EF, math learning, and students’ attitudes and beliefs about their math learning.
• Produced classroom-ready products and research tools that demonstrate promising evidence of impact.
• Built a cross-sector community of 700+ educators, developers, and researchers committed to equity-centered R&D.
• Modeled how actively managed, inclusive R&D can transform both the process and the products of education research.

Together, these contributions leave a legacy of evidence, tools, and community that will continue to shape the field long after the program’s sunset.