Department of Human Development and Family Science faculty members Caroline Hornburg and Benjamin Katz were awarded grants as part of separate teams through the EF+Math’s Prototyping Track to design and develop teacher- and student-centered learning systems that embed executive function skill-building within high-quality mathematics content and instruction.

Hornburg is part of the Our Mathematical World team, which is creating a multi-stage curriculum overlay in which students design stories that center themselves as strong mathematical problem solvers. The project goal is to improve third- and fourth-grade students’ multi-step problem-solving skills, mathematics vocabulary, executive function skills, and mathematical identity.

Katz is a member of the SparkMath team and will work to develop a comprehensive set of replacement units for sixth-grade math that attends to cultural relevance, math identity and belonging, executive function skills, mathematization of concepts that students find relevant, the realities of classrooms and current practice, and classroom social norms.