Scaling Math Success in Rural Schools

In 2019, ASSISTments received a federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant from the U.S. Department of Education, in partnership with WestEd and Lesley University. The goal was ambitious but clear: scale ASSISTments, a research-backed online math assessment tool to better support teachers and students in rural communities. 

This project required us to learn alongside rural educators, adapt to real-world constraints, and share what it truly takes to scale evidence-based support in communities that are too often under-resourced and overlooked.

Now that the project is complete and the final reports are publicly available, we want to share what we built, what the evidence shows, and, most importantly, what we learned from working with rural schools across the country.

Designing for Rural Contexts From the Start

Rural schools serve nearly one-third of students in the United States. They often face systemic barriers to adopting and sustaining new instructional approaches. Geographic isolation, fewer opportunities for collaboration, and limited access to subject-specific professional development can make even proven tools difficult to implement at scale.

ASSISTments had already shown positive effects on student learning, particularly for students who began the year already behind in math. Our original implementation model included in person onbaording training and in-person visits from an experienced coach. Unfortunately, this model is costly and challenging to scale in a rural setting. 

This project enabled us to develop and design virtual support to sustain the platform's use in meaningful ways. The impetus for designing an effective virtual professional learning model was to support teachers in rural contexts; however, as the pandemic disrupted in-person schooling and virtual PD became the norm, the question of how to design effective virtual support became a relevant question for all populations over the course of the grant. 

The project anchored on  two core components:

• ASSISTments, which allows teachers to assign standards-aligned math problems, provide immediate feedback, and access real-time data on student understanding; and
  
  
• Virtual professional learning communities (vPLCs), designed to help teachers interpret that data and use it to inform instruction, without requiring travel, substitute coverage, or proximity to colleagues.

We spent two years designing, testing, and iterating on our vPLCs. We then partnered with WestEd to study the impact, with nearly half of the participating schools located in rural communities, spanning 24 states.

For many teachers (especially those who were the sole grade-level instructors in their school), the vPLC became their primary space for instructional collaboration.

What Scaling Required in Practice

Scaling an intervention often gets framed as a question of reach. However, the quality of implementation matters just as much as the number of teachers and students who implement the program.

To support quality implementation, we focused on:

1. Improving platform usability and infrastructure, so that ASSISTments could be integrated into teachers’ daily routines with less friction and greater sustainability.
2. Developing a low-cost, replicable vPLC model, grounded in teachers’ real classroom data rather than abstract examples.
3. Embedding instructional guidance directly into the platform, pairing student performance data with concrete suggestions for instructional response.

One tangible outcome of this work was the development of more than 1,000 curriculum-aligned Instructional Recommendations. These teacher-authored, expert-reviewed supports are embedded within ASSISTments and linked to common student misconceptions, helping teachers move from data to action within their existing workflow.

Evidence for Rural and High-Need Students

An independent evaluation conducted by WestEd examined both implementation and impact among 59 teachers and 2,855 students in 36 public schools across 24 US states. 

Ninety-one percent of participating teachers used ASSISTments to support implementation of high-quality curricula, including Illustrative Mathematics, Eureka/EngageNY, and Open Up Resources. Within that context, the findings showed the strongest gains for students who began the year below grade level.

Students in the 25th–50th percentile saw an effect size of .16. Students in the bottom 25th percentile also experienced significant gains (.10). These are the students most often concentrated in rural and under-resourced schools.

The evaluation also documented meaningful shifts in instructional practice. Nearly all teachers reported that the vPLC influenced how they assigned independent practice, reviewed student work, and adjusted instruction based on data. Implementation logs showed regular use of ASSISTments reports and sustained student engagement across the school year 

Teachers described the professional learning community not just as training, but as connection. As one teacher explained:

“I’m at a small school, and I’m the only seventh-grade teacher. … I don’t have a chance to collaborate with people who also teach seventh-grade math, just some new perspectives.”

Survey data reinforced this experience. Teachers without grade-level peers reported higher preparedness after participating in the vPLC (4.95 out of 5 on average) than those with local colleagues (4.63), suggesting that access to a professional community can matter more than physical proximity

Rather than simply increasing access to a tool, the project strengthened how teachers used data to inform instruction—and the students who benefited most were those who began the year academically behind.

Looking Ahead—and Sharing What We Learned

While the evaluation findings offer important evidence about impact, one of the most consequential outcomes of this work was what we learned about designing virtual professional learning that is both scalable and responsive to rural contexts. Over the course of the grant, the virtual professional learning community evolved in response to teacher feedback, participation patterns, and the realities of implementation in geographically dispersed schools.

Those lessons extended beyond any single cohort or study year. We saw these lessons not as project-specific insights, but as guidance that could be useful to others working in similar contexts.

Working alongside Lesley University to design the vPLC model, we identified several lessons about what makes virtual professional development successful at scale.

1. Establish a shared instructional focus

While we aimed to organize cohorts by grade level when possible, what ultimately grounded the vPLC was not uniformity of context, but a shared commitment to improving math instruction through formative assessment. Teachers entered with different grade levels and varying experience, but each session centered on real ASSISTments data and common instructional challenges. That shared focus allowed conversations to deepen—even when participants were not teaching the same course. 

2.  Anchor learning in authentic practice

Sessions did not revolve around abstract strategies. We highlighted real classroom examples and created space for teachers to share their own implementation stories. The conversation was grounded in lived experience, not theory.

3. Designing for equity of voice

The program was designed to draw in quieter participants, use multiple discussion formats, and structure small-group conversations before whole-group sharing. Participation was not left to chance. It was intentionally cultivated.

4. Provide time to apply

Each session focused on a specific component of effective ASSISTments use, and teachers left with time and clarity to connect that learning directly to their own classrooms. Application was not an afterthought; it was built into the design.

Together, these lessons shaped the development of our publicly available vPLC Facilitation Guide, which captures the structures, facilitation moves, and routines that supported meaningful collaboration among teachers across states and school contexts.

Alongside the Final Evaluation Report and the Companion Implementation Report, conducted by WestEd, the guide reflects a core commitment of this project: not only to demonstrate impact, but also to share what it takes to achieve and sustain that impact at scale.

We are grateful to the teachers, schools, and communities who partnered with us in this work—and to the funders who made it possible to ask not only whether something works, but for whom, under what conditions, and why.

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