Effective Strategies to Improve Secondary Students’ Math and Language Skills 

April 15, 2025

By Haiwen Chu, Senior Research Associate, Mathematics

Researchers from the National Research and Development Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners report that teaching students English language skills while they are learning math skills—rather than isolating the two subjects—may offer the fastest path toward success for all students, particularly the 2.2 million students who are also learning to read, write, think, and speak in English.

This insight is a result of an impact study of RAMP-UP, a new secondary school curriculum designed to accelerate learning in mathematics and language for all students. RAMP-UP is an acronym for Reimagining and Amplifying Mathematical Participation, Understanding, and Practices.

WestEd’s Dr. Haiwen Chu and Leslie Hamburger served as investigators on the study of the curriculum. They noted that the problem they focused on is ubiquitous.

“We see a lack of student engagement in mathematical thinking in American classrooms,” says Hamburger. “The challenge is universal, and, as it turns out, especially critical for children who are learning English.”

A root cause of the problem, Chu says, lies in the fact that educators and policymakers commonly hold the paradigm that language is a prerequisite for learning subjects like math rather than language development being a consequence of learning.

“Most schools pre-teach math ‘vocabulary,’” he says, “using rigid scripts and giving students mathematical ‘definitions.’ But research shows that when students do not have opportunities to generate ideas, they do have quality opportunities to actually conceptually learn math and language simultaneously.”

Recent scores on the Nation’s Report Card indicate a crisis in mathematics proficiency nationally. Researchers say that now is the time for change, particularly given national interest in doubling down on mathematics to prepare future generations to contribute to the economy.

The Importance of Creating Meaningful Opportunities

“When students have meaningful opportunities with groups of peers to discuss, unpack and co-construct meanings and connections between and cross-cutting math concepts they begin to recognize, care about, understand, and apply math, using language,” says Chu.

By “cross-cutting math concepts,” the researchers mean overarching foundational concepts or throughlines that cut across the subdomains of algebra, geometry, and statistics. One such example is “patterns of growth and change.” Others include “equivalence & transformation,” and “networks & surfaces.”

For example, Chu describes a RAMP-UP activity in which students are invited to describe to each other what patterns they notice potentially forming when they look closely and draw from their prior knowledge.

Such educational opportunities for groups of students to “talk” about academic concepts in increasingly sophisticated ways in order to form deep understanding of them are called quality interactions. They work so well, experts explain, because they draw from sociocultural and sociolinguistic research showing that students are driven to belong to social groups and find meaning behind language.

“Learners care about language because it matters to them, socially,” says Ester de Jong, a professor in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education program at the University of Colorado Denver and former president of The English as a Second Language (TESOL) International Association (2017–2018). “Motivation emerges from social interaction. Quality Interactions models allow students to engage in sophisticated, rigorous, deep, ambitious content learning.”

Engaging Students in Quality Interactions

Chu and Hamburger designed, implemented and evaluated a 3-week summer math bridge course that sought to engage rising 9th graders in Quality Interactions around crosscutting math concepts.

RAMP-UP then invited students who were already enrolled in summer school in participating districts in California, New York, and Washington to attend the 3-week course. Students’ language and math backgrounds differed each summer, encompassing different mixes of newcomers, long-term English Learners, and English-proficient students. Students attending RAMP-UP—which aimed to get them up to speed in math and language in time for high school—were opted into the program by their parents.

Ultimately, researchers studied the impact of the RAMP-UP curriculum in classrooms over three summer field trials, with the final summer 2024 pilot study a delayed-intervention randomized controlled trial. Chu and Hamburger specifically documented and analyzed the impact of two interventions:

• focusing students on conceptual math ideas—like patterns or equivalence—rather than shuffling students through what researchers refer to as “parades of procedures”
• inviting students to unpack and connect mathematical ideas as they arise through structured, carefully scaffolded conversations with peers, making mental connections as they go

Key Findings

Although RAMP-UP classrooms experienced some student attrition following the pandemic, researchers found promising evidence of student growth in language and simultaneous growth in mathematical concepts and practices.

RAMP-UP researchers report that while newcomers to the United States made the greatest strides in language acquisition, and students possessing more English made the greatest strides in math, all in the treatment group advanced in both math and language development, demonstrating positive impacts in line with summer school program advantages.

“Within each class, we observed numerous examples of rapid student growth integrating speaking, listening, reading, and writing with mathematics,” said Hamburger.

For example, she notes, as groups of students dove in to digest and generate visual images, co-construct graphs, take turns describing patterns, cocreate labels, prove and explain their thinking, and much more, RAMP-UP researchers documented increased student learning over time. The result, now publicly available, includes transcripts of language, writings, drawings, tables, graphs and other work products—and shows what is possible when these interventions are implemented.

“Students increasingly worked together to actively build upon, challenge, and refine each other’s contributions—such as with the mathematical language practices of description, explanation, and argument—using whatever English was available to them that day,” Chu reported.

“Students also navigated from more informal, dialogic uses of language to more planned, technical, monologic uses of language,” Hamburger reports. “Our transcripts and student work samples demonstrate how quickly language skills can grow when students are offered purposeful opportunities to get involved in their own learning.”

Key to getting students to engage in verbal and written interactions with peers were specific RAMP-UP scaffolds that researchers have now made publicly available. They include sentence starters or guidance cards that prompt students to offer opinions and information but that also, importantly, invite them to converge and reach consensus.

RAMP-UP researchers also note that it is imperative that teachers seeking to create Quality Interactions activities frame activities in terms of examples, metaphors, or analogies that students can recognize. (For examples of RAMP-UP activities and scaffolds in action and snapshots of documented student growth, see the list of available resources below.)

Finally, researchers note that RAMP-UP also produced demonstrable improvements in teacher practice. For example, researchers collected the following evidence:

• Teachers’ views of students changed, from deficit based to asset based, as teachers witnessed new capacities in English Leaners regardless of their language proficiency or prior schooling. Teachers at the end of RAMP-UP articulated their belief that English Learners can and will engage in rigorous learning.
• Teachers also greatly improved in their ability to help students make connections, shifting from telling and showing to better noticing student thinking and adapting their instruction to facilitate student interactions. For example, researchers note that teachers toward the end of RAMP-UP spent more time building student understanding and adopting new pedagogical moves to advance student learning.

Hamburger says the power of RAMP-UP modules comes from the fact that they engaged all students in Quality Interactions: “The amount of language practice is really very abundant for every student,” she says. “We see their utterances are getting longer, and more sustained.”

Teachers who participated in RAMP-UP reported similar progress:

• “Students are more comfortable with the process and use more ‘math’ language. They are trying to see relationships and making connections.”
• “One of the great things to see, is students’ perseverance. They want to see it, they want to understand.”
• “Newcomer students are more confident/comfortable verbalizing their ideas.”

It is important to reiterate, Chu cautions, that “our focus on language was not a focus on building vocabulary, but rather on how do students develop language proficiency to engage in doing math with others—and communicating mathematical ideas in consistently precise ways.”

Hamburger agrees. “Don’t front load vocabulary—just wait—in no time, they pick up on and appropriate language from their peers—they very quickly pick up language and mathematics concepts.”

Recently named among City University of New York’s 50 Under 50 Alumni, Chu presented RAMP-UP findings at the 2024 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference in Chicago, the 2025 STEAM Symposium in San Diego, and the 2025 ESEA conference in Austin.

How to Access RAMP-UP Materials at No Cost

RAMP-UP materials, produced by National R&D Center to Improve Education for Secondary English Learners researchers in close collaboration with educators and based on classroom applications, are now widely available to the field at no cost. They include curricula, course materials, and a suite of educative materials for teachers, and they build upon related resources from the Center regarding Quality Interactions: 

RAMP-UP study, results and examples of student work: 

• Results from the Reimagining and Amplifying Mathematics Participation, Understanding, and Practices (RAMP-UP) Study webinar 
• Dialogical practices: Developing deep conceptual understandings and language practices in Math presentation, made at the “Reconceptualizing the Development of Educator Expertise for a Multilingual, Intercultural Future” conference held in June 2024 in Portland, Oregon 

Three RAMP-UP modules are now available for educators to use:   

• Patterns of Growth and Change 
• Equivalence & Transformation 
• For more background, see also Engaging English Learners With Equivalence as a Crosscutting Concept in Mathematics. 
• Networks & Surfaces 

Related Research-Based Resources 

• How to Engage English Learners in Math: Q&A with Dr. Haiwen Chu  
• Recommended lesson planning “three moment architecture” for math teachers 
• All sorts of quality interactions: examples of particular sorting activities, such as grouping, ordering, and matching, that according to research elicits rich peer dialogue and provides students with specific language and structure. The resource also speaks to how to surface prior ideas; connect representations, procedures, and situations; and, ultimately, extend learning to novel scenarios.   
• Redefining Approaches for Engaging English Learners With Mathematical Ideas shows how to optimally engage groups of students in deep and meaningful mathematical thinking and conversation, considering different levels of English proficiency. 

“It is possible, it is doable, it happens in pockets—how do we make this happen for everyone, and how do we design learning experiences that really support students to accelerate their mathematics and their language learning. [T]his curriculum does that, is demonstrated to do that, for a variety of student groups.” — Leslie Hamburger, coinvestigator, RAMP-UP study

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education, supports this research through Grant R305C200008 to WestEd. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. IES is the statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. IES is an independent and nonpartisan organization created by the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA) of 2002, and it is the leading source of rigorous education research and evaluation. It consists of the National Center for Education Research (NCER), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER).