In the 2023–2024 school year, about 77% of studied Texas 4th and 5th graders using STEMscopes Math met or exceeded the standard on the STAAR Math test. Among matched students in comparable districts that didn’t use the program, the figure was about 69%.
That eight-point gap is the headline of a study LXD Research completed with the International Centre for EdTech Impact. It was approved by Evidence for ESSA, which lists it at the Promising level because that is the site’s category for retrospective designs, and LXD’s own review rated the quasi-experimental design ESSA Tier II (Moderate). The study was presented as part of a research symposium at the 2026 conference of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) in Baltimore. SREE is a professional society for researchers whose work is relevant to practice, from early childhood through post-secondary education, and its annual conference is where researchers share and discuss studies of what works in schools. It is also a useful example of how an efficacy study can be built when a product is already in schools, and nobody planned a research project in advance. Studies like this could be a cost-effective way to figure out which current school products are helping students learn, and which ones need improvement.
Start of the Study
We began with publicly available data, using it to identify Texas districts with strong use of STEMscopes Math. This ordering matters. A program can only show an effect if students actually experienced it, so we started from places where implementation was already substantial rather than hoping to detect an effect in schools where the program was purchased but barely used.
How Do You Build a Fair Comparison?
Once you know where a program is being used well, the harder challenge is building a fair comparison. We looked for similar baseline schools that did not use STEMscopes Math. The final analysis matched students in STEMscopes districts with similar students in non-STEMscopes districts, using prior math scores and some key student characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, economic status, and English learner status.
Students started from a comparable place before the program, so the comparison wasn’t simply high performers against low performers.
Groups looked alike on the factors most likely to shape test performance, not only on last year’s score.
The matching is what turns a simple comparison of two sets of scores into something a procurement team, teacher, or parent can take seriously, because it addresses the central question they will ask: whether the groups were different from the start. We want to make sure our comparisons are fair from the start.
Can You Really Get Student-Level Data From a State?
Public data can point you to the right schools, but it can’t tell you how individual students grew. For that, we requested student-level records from the state of Texas.
The request took a few months and a few hundred dollars. Many edtech teams assume that kind of data is out of reach without a district partnership or a large research budget. In this case it wasn’t. The effort went into asking precisely, waiting for the records, and having a clear analysis plan in place by the time they arrived.
What Did the Study Find?
The final sample included just over 4,000 students across six Texas districts. Students who used STEMscopes Math scored higher on the 2024 STAAR Math test than comparable students in districts that did not use it, and the pattern held in both grades 4 and 5, so the result wasn’t driven by a single grade level. A larger share of STEMscopes students also met or exceeded grade-level expectations: about 77%, compared with about 69%.
The benefits also appeared for groups that often face greater academic challenges, including economically disadvantaged students, Hispanic students, and Black students.
You can read the full results. The complete STEMscopes Math efficacy report is available on ResearchGate, and you can see how it fits alongside our other work on our published studies page.
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Book an ESSA Evidence Review Learn more about ESSA Tier II studiesWhat Does This Mean If Your Product Is Already in Schools?
If your product has been in use for a few years, some of the evidence you need may already exist in public and state data. The design choices carry the credibility: who does the study (an independent research firm is recommended), which districts to include, how to build the comparison, and how to account for baseline differences.
Not every question can be answered this way, and not every study guarantees a particular rating. But a retrospective design is worth considering early, before you assume the only route to evidence is a new, expensive pilot. Our articles What Study Design Do You Actually Need for ESSA Tier II? and What Does ESSA Tier III Evidence Actually Look Like? explain how different designs map to evidence levels.
You can read the STEMscopes Math study summary and learn more about the program on the STEMscopes Math page.
It is also worth noting how well Accelerate Learning has presented its evidence. Its research and efficacy studies page brings every study together in one place, and visitors can filter by program, grade level, region, and study type. Each study gets a plain-language summary covering the background, what the researchers did, the key findings, and a link to the full report. Its newer summary of a 2026 Texas middle school study follows the same format. A study only helps a district leader if they can find it and understand it, and this is a good model for other edtech companies to follow.
Thank you to our funder. Funding for the study was supported by The Jacobs Foundation. We are grateful for their support in making this work possible.
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