Associate Professor Rachel Lambert is on a mission to make math learning fun.
After more than a decade teaching math in elementary school classrooms, Rachel Lambert, experienced firsthand how students struggled with the subject and were often bored, disconnected or convinced they weren’t good at math. Now an associate professor of special education and mathematics education in the Gevirtz School Department of Education, Lambert has made it her mission to change that by finding ways of making math accessible, engaging and above all, fun.
Today, Lambert and Gevirtz graduate students, Jennifer Goldberg and Tomy Nguyen, are carrying that mission into classrooms. For the last four years they have studied how teachers, special educators and instructional assistants use games to improve math learning, boost confidence and turn problemsolving into play.
In 2021, Lambert and her research team launched the GAME (Growing Access to Mathematical Engagement) Project for third- and fourthgrade students at Harding University Partnership School and Cleveland Elementary in Santa Barbara to provide enrichment and intervention using non-digital board and card games.
During “games time,” teachers are given highquality math games and observed on how they use them with students, how they organize play, which games succeed and which fall flat. Favorites include Set, a logic game, and Allowance, which is like Monopoly for kids. Some of the most popular games tend to be the ones that are tactile, fun to touch and feel, like the game Fraction Fortress, in which kids build towers out of fractional pieces.
“When kids were playing without a teacher, they were spending a ton of time just exploring,” noted Lambert. “These third- and fourth-graders who needed to learn fractions were handling the pieces, comparing them and figuring things out. I think we underestimate how much more they might learn from doing this than from a worksheet on the same skill.”
In one of her earliest teaching experiences, a combined fifth- and sixth-grade, multi-age class in Harlem, New York, where nearly a third of the students had IEPs (independent education programs), Lambert learned that a one-size-fitsall approach to math would not work for all of her students: “It always has to be engaging and meaningful and meet kids where they are,” she said.
After the pandemic, as classrooms filled with students whose math skills ranged more widely than ever, the Santa Barbara Unified School District approached Lambert about building an intervention program that could reach every child. She had been leading small-group interventions, but the school district wanted a “push in” intervention that could reach all kids in a classroom. Their idea was to center it on board and card games, and not digital screens. For Lambert, it was a natural fit.
“I deeply loved that idea,” said Lambert. “As a teacher, I had a ton of math games in my classroom and I used them as tools. If a kid didn’t understand fractions, I had a game I could pull out and use for that.”
The GAME Project is a design research study in which researchers work closely with teachers, administrators and districts to design interventions that work in the unique contexts of schools. Through extensive interviews with students, teachers and administrators, Lambert and her co-researchers have documented the success of the project.
Students overwhelmingly endorse the time spent playing games and report that they enjoy the practice that the games provide. Teachers describe positive shifts in how the students feel about mathematics. Teachers noticed that students seem more willing to take risks with challenging topics like fractions while playing games. And both teachers and students note that the quality of the games really matters to their learning. Both schools have made gains on math test scores in the last few years, with Harding, in particular, making dramatic progress last year.
Through her work as a special educator, Lambert became convinced that math classes could be radically improved for students with disabilities. These students often faced the most inaccessible and onesize-fits-all curriculum.
Transforming the math classroom experience from boring and inaccessible to fun and meaningful is a passion that inspired Lambert to write her first book, “Rethinking Disability and Mathematics: A UDL Math Classroom Guide for Grades K-8.” Published in 2024, the book has sold more than 12,000 copies. For an academic title those numbers are considered remarkable, Lambert said.
The book’s success surprised its publishers but confirmed Lambert’s belief that educators were hungry for this type of research. At an early meeting with a publisher, Lambert was told not to expect large sales.
“They told me it wasn’t going to sell,” recalled Lambert. “They said, ‘Teachers don’t want to read about math and math teachers don’t see themselves as special educators, so who’s going to buy the book?’ But the need was there.”
Her book looks at shifting away from focusing on what students with disabilities can’t do to a model that highlights their unique strengths. The stories she tells feature real classrooms where neurodiverse students not only learn math but thrive at it, as well as teachers who excel at making mathematics both accessible and rigorous.
Neurodiversity describes cognitive differences in how people think, learn and behave. In Lambert’s book, she focuses on neurodiversity to include dyslexia, autism, intellectual disabilities and ADHD.
“Most of the book is about rethinking disability, moving away from a deficit model to a strengthbased model,” she said. “What does that look like in math? How can we rethink who can be good at math?”
Lambert, who is working on a second book about educational research in the area of mathematics, never intended to become a math teacher.
“I thought I was a creative person and that creative people weren’t good at math,” she recalled. “But when I started teaching math, I found out I was really good at it, mainly because I needed it to be fun. I needed it to be super engaging for me and for the kids and I found that it was very successful.”
Lambert’s work is as much about fun and joy as it is about the practice of teaching. The research matters, but what stays with her are the moments when students light up, when math becomes something they look forward to with anticipation, rather than something they endure.
“I walked into a classroom and one kid yelled, ‘The games lady is here!’ and then nearly fell off his chair, he was so excited,” Lambert recalled. “I love my job!”