Dive Brief:

• TenMarks Summer Math Program will be available for free to schools and parents for a second year beginning May 19.
• Founded six years ago, the online math program provider was acquired by Amazon in 2013, and its Summer Math Program is meant to combat the two to three months of math learning research has shown students lose over summer.
• The Amazon acquisition made it possible to offer the summer program for free, which in turn allowed schools and districts to scale it to all families, irrespective of income, during summer school programs.

Dive Insight:

“One of the things we realized early on, that there’s been a lot of research and work around, when schools let out for the summer, there’s about a two-and-a-half month gap where the students, of course, usually have a reading list," Rohit Agarwal, TenMarks founder and CEO, told Education Dive. "And over the course of the last few years, people have realized that students should stay focused on improving or maintaining their math skills over the summer, as well.”

For school districts with summer school programming, TenMarks — which is available via browser and as an iPad, Android, and Fire OS app — provides an opportunity to keep students up to speed, or help them catch up, on critical math skills. Summer learning loss, Agarwal said, has been shown to be universal across socioeconomic backgrounds and grade levels, and it's a particularly critical issue in math because the subject is foundational. Every year builds on the previous year, and it also tends to be taught differently to children than when their parents learned it decades before.

TenMarks' Summer Math Program assesses students on skills they’re supposed to know for the next grade, mapped to current curriculum standards, and personalizes what they work on over summer based on their level of preparedness. In addition to being part of an effort to meet district requests and scale the program, the initial decision to make it free last year was also about being good corporate citizens, Agarwal said. Individual parents originally paid $39.95 per student for access.