Key takeaways
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Targeted Learning: New Focused Adaptive Pathways let districts prioritize the standards they want to focus on for end-of-year state assessments or district goals.
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Teacher-First Flexibility: Teachers can build on their district focus by assigning lessons aligned to standards, curriculum, or assessments.
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Proven Adaptivity: DreamBox’s Intelligent Adaptive Engine remains the same, so educators will continue to deliver the personalized learning they expect to.
DreamBox Math, the supplemental math program known and loved for its real-time adaptivity and instructional rigor, now gives educators a new way to teach to district priorities. Focused Adaptive Pathways allow administrators to choose which standards to focus on, so students spend more time working toward those standards. This update will also help educators meet accountability requirements in their district.
Let’s look at what’s changed in DreamBox Math and what this means for teaching and learning.
1. Learning Aligned to District Priorities
The new Focused Adaptive Pathways enable district administrators to target key standards within the DreamBox Math curriculum and align each student’s personalized journey to the skills and concepts the district prioritizes.
Same adaptive engine, same mathematical rigor, sharply aimed at district priorities.
- DreamBox Math focuses on the standards most critical to your district’s goals to accelerate progress in the key standards first.
- Our intentionally designed curriculum engages thinking, reasoning, and strategic problem-solving and pairs with classroom-aligned resources that empower teachers to flexibly move learning forward.
- Intelligent adaptivity creates learning pathways that remain deeply personalized for each student.
Maximize Every Math Minute
In districts where key standards drive measurable outcomes, leaders have asked for assurance that learning in DreamBox Math is objective-aligned learning, with data to show for it. Now, within Focused Adaptive Pathways, districts can set their students’ Intelligent Adaptive Pathways to target their key standards, ensuring math time is meaningfully spent. And it can help educators in other ways, such as recovering lost learning, differentiating at scale, and supporting targeted interventions for those with greater needs.
2. Smart Adaptivity, Sharper Focus
Choose Your Pathways. We Do the Rest
With a simple setting, districts can choose how they want DreamBox to prioritize key standards. An administrator sets the focus level from District Settings. The Intelligent Adaptive Engine takes over from there and creates personalized learning pathways for each student that aim for the priority standards first.
Choose DreamBox’s signature Comprehensive Adaptive Pathways for individualized learning experiences based on student performance across all grade levels, all domains and standards of the entire scope of lessons. Each standard is prioritized equally.
Choose Focused Adaptive Pathways for individualized learning experiences that prioritize key standards and their prerequisites first. This aims DreamBox’s adaptive engine toward the most important state-assessed standards or locally identified standards that drive instructional initiatives and accelerate learning outcomes.
- State-Assessment Focus: Available in states where a set of key standards is assessed and published at the end of the year. Priority standards are set by the state’s end-of-year assessment.
- District-Priority Focus: Rolling out to all states through early 2027. Districts select between 25 and 80% of their state’s standards, in alignment with their most important initiatives and goals.
Take a virtual walkthrough of administrator settings to see how they work.
3. Deep Conceptual Rigor Built-In
Thinking is the fuel that powers DreamBox’s Intelligent Adaptive Engine to meet each student where they are. In Focused Adaptive Pathways, students get the same deeply personalized learning experiences with lessons that focus on the priority standards first.
Adaptive lessons in DreamBox ensure that every moment is meaningful and aimed at educator goals. Students develop mathematical thinking and reasoning as they make sense of concepts through modeling, identifying structures and relationships, applying multiple strategies, building numeracy and strengthening procedural skills. This helps them build fluency and the confidence that they can do the math.
Automatic Prerequisite Mapping
Focused Adaptive Pathways ensure that each student builds proficiency in the prerequisite skills they need for progress in the priority standards.
4. Empowering Teachers in the Classroom
With automatically differentiated Focused Adaptive Pathways prioritizing for district goals, ongoing progress monitoring data, and flexible tools, teachers can connect DreamBox with curriculum, standards, and data from NWEA assessments. This enables them to deliver the instruction their students need—in the classroom, at the moment, and with flexibility.
Priority standards are easy to identify throughout the Insights Dashboard, so teachers always know which ones DreamBox has prioritized.
When standards are prioritized, assignments will still draw from the comprehensive scope of DreamBox lessons as teachers target classroom and individual needs.
Real-Time Proficiency Insights
As educators monitor proficiency in DreamBox against the priority standards, they’ll start to notice where students need extra support. Then they can create long-term assignments by standard directly from the standards report and monitor weekly progress in that standard.
Leaders and educators can easily identify which students are making progress across the priority standards and which need targeted support over time.
Take a virtual walkthrough of administrator settings to see how they work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is this not just teaching to the test?
It’s quite the opposite! Focused Adaptive Pathways will include personalized lessons that build and strengthen conceptual understanding, mathematical thinking, reasoning, and fluency, all sequenced toward the priority standards—and their prerequisites—you’re accountable for first.
Q: Isn’t this what DreamBox already does?
While DreamBox Math has always shown how lessons align with state standards and many math curriculum programs, it now adapts toward the standards that districts identify as priority, with each student’s personalized pathway sequenced by prerequisites. This approach ensures that the time students spend in DreamBox is focused on the standards that matter the most in their district.
Q: Will this reduce the scope of lessons available to students?
Not at all. Focused Adaptive Pathways simply ensure that the personalized learning journeys for each student focus on the district-identified priority standards and their prerequisites first. This may change the order and the sequence of DreamBox lessons, but it doesn’t change the instructional depth of lessons. Students still get the same rigorous and responsive learning experience with in-lesson adaptivity, targeted scaffolding, immediate feedback, and intentional mathematics that educators trust DreamBox to provide. Plus, teachers can add up to two assignments that draw from the entire depth and breadth of our comprehensive curriculum.
