A school board can tell you how last year’s cohort performed against a provincial benchmark. What it usually can’t tell you is whether the student who was placed in a small support group back in October is catching up by December.
The further you zoom out on the data – and to reach a district leader’s perspective, you have to zoom out very far – the harder it gets to see whether the support provided to a student is working, has stopped working or never worked in the first place. From the district office, the three can look identical.
Provincial inclusion policy across most of Canada aims at keeping the student in the classroom, with their peers, and bringing the support to them rather than sending them elsewhere, and most educators agree with that instinct. But it also raises the bar on what a board needs to be able to show – that the intervention is actually doing something.
That’s the problem a Multi-Tiered System of Supports, or MTSS, is designed to solve. Some staff rooms still call it Response to Intervention, but the idea remains the same: three tiers, and a student moves between them based on how they respond, not on a label that follows them around all year.
Most of that action happens at Tier 2, making it the focus of this article. It’s where small groups actually form, where data starts to shape decisions rather than just record them, and where a school works out whether a student is ready to step back to Tier 1 or needs to move up to Tier 3. It’s also where most of a board’s intervention time and staffing budget ends up going.
This article looks at how Mathletics, an evidence-based online math program for Kindergarten to Grade 10, supports that kind of decision-making at every tier, with most of the emphasis on Tier 2. Worth noting for boards weighing evidence: Mathletics holds the ISTE Seal of Alignment, recognizing its alignment with strong digital pedagogy and classroom usability.
Matt Henderson, Former Chief Superintendent of Winnipeg School Division, has a plainer way of putting it:
“Mathletics is a real sort of fruit basket of data for us to be able to get better at teaching.”
The three tiers of MTSS and how Mathletics supports each one
TIER 1: Universal instruction
Tier 1 is the instruction every student gets, regardless of where they’re at. Done well, it’s enough on its own for most of a class – something closer to 80–90%, depending on who you ask. This is the prevention layer: catching gaps before they turn into something a small group needs to fix, not cleaning up after the fact.
Mathletics works as a Tier 1 tool by giving every student, not just the ones falling behind, explicit and systematic instruction built around a curriculum-aligned learning pathway. With 30,000+ activities spanning Kindergarten to Grade 10, teachers can assign work to the whole class in seconds, and real-time reporting means they don’t have to wait until they are able to mark student work to see where their students are.
It’s also personalized from the start. A student working ahead and a student working behind can be in the same room, on the same platform, each working at the edge of what they’re ready for – so Tier 1 isn’t a flat, one-size-fits-all baseline, even before anyone needs Tier 2.
Activities, assessments, resources, worksheets for offline learning – all align to provincial and territorial curricula across Canada.
Tier 2: Targeted support in a real Canadian classroom
Smaller in scale than Tier 1 and much bigger in consequence, Tier 2 informs schools whether their interventions are working.
It applies to a handful of students, pulled from the pace of the whole class, working on something a bit more targeted. Whether that time actually closes a gap or just fills a block on the timetable comes down to two things: whether the intervention is aimed at the right skill, and whether anyone’s checking, week to week, if it’s landing.
At College Heights Christian School in Alberta, that’s the exact problem Mathletics is built to sit inside. Steven Gabrys, the school’s principal, has watched it work at the level of the whole building rather than one classroom:
“The program allows us to meet the needs of diverse learners simultaneously, without them even realizing it. We can challenge gifted students while providing targeted support for those who are struggling.”
Of course, knowing a student needs help isn’t the same as knowing what they need specifically. Mathletics helps solve this gap and target teaching through:
- Diagnosing the actual gap. Assessments are curriculum-aligned and flag the specific skill a student is missing – not “behind,” but behind on this: place value, say, rather than fractions, or the other way round. Two students filed under “struggling with math” can need entirely different groups.
- Grouping students precisely. With just a few clicks, teachers can split a class into up to 12 differentiated groups, each working through its own course and its own sequence of activities, so a group is built around a shared gap rather than a rough guess at who’s behind.
- Sending students back when that’s what’s needed. Where the real problem sits a step or two earlier in the sequence, the Fill Learning Gaps tool moves a student back to that prerequisite concept, rather than pushing them into grade-level content they’re not ready for yet.
- Tracking the group, not just the activity. Comprehensive reporting, including Curriculum Performance Reporting, shows whether a group is actually closing its target gap, at both the individual and group level – making an immediate check-in possible, rather than letting an error become a bad habit when there is too much time before intervention. More specifically, the Skill Quest Mastery report shows exactly how each student is progressing through specific quests, while Activity Mastery reports break strengths and weaknesses down by topic – so a teacher isn’t just seeing a score, but knows where to aim the next homework set. A traffic-light system (Learning, Proficient, Mastered) makes it possible to scan a whole group’s standing at a glance, rather than reading raw numbers one student at a time.
- Turning homework into something adjusted, not generic. Assigning a personalized activity takes minutes, which is enough time to set homework matched to what a specific student needs to practice, instead of sending the same worksheet home to everyone.
- Cutting the prep time out of running a group. Ready-to-use resources, built around specific concepts, mean a teacher isn’t building intervention materials from scratch on top of everything else on their plate.
That’s the fade-or-escalate decision at the heart of Tier 2, in practice. A student who starts closing the gap can step back to Tier 1 without a formal meeting or a new label attached to their name, while one who isn’t responding gets flagged early enough that a move to Tier 3 is a planned decision, not a late one.
It also means Tier 2 can absorb more of the work that used to require pulling a student out of the room altogether – which is most of what “inclusive” is supposed to mean.
Tier 3: Intensive support
Tier 3 is the smallest tier by number of students, and the most individual in what it asks of a program. A student here isn’t in a group anymore – the work is built around exactly what they, specifically, are missing, usually alongside a specialist or resource teacher rather than in place.
Mathletics in no way stands in for that specialist. Instead, it gives them support and somewhere to start: activity sequences built around precise skill gaps rather than a fixed grade level, immediate automatic feedback so a struggling student isn’t repeating a wrong strategy for days before anyone catches it.
What’s more, diagnostic data granular enough to show whether the intensity of an intervention is actually matched to what’s happening. Pathways adjust as the student does, so a plan made in September isn’t still being followed, unchanged, in November.
The evidence behind tiered approach to math
39 studies, pooled together in a 2021 meta-analysis published in Exceptional Children, put a number on how much Tier 2 math support actually helps: an effect size of 0.41. That may seem like a small number by the standards researchers use, but it sits comfortably in the range they’d call a practical gain for students struggling with math. Putting the research into real-world terms: It’s the kind of effect a math teacher could notice over the course of a semester.
Ontario got to roughly the same place by a different route, years earlier. The province has been building out a tiered approach to instruction since 2005, formalized since 2013 in a Ministry resource called Learning for All. Other provinces have their own version, under their own name, but the shape of it tends to be the same everywhere: catch a gap early, and let how a student responds decide what happens next.
Mathletics is built to help achieve the same goal, with research linking regular, consistent weekly use to measurable gains. Its digital pedagogy and classroom usability were also recognized with the prestigious ISTE Seal of Alignment in 2024, renewed in 2026.
Talk to us about your Tier 2 data
No two boards or districts run Tier 2 quite the same way. Bring your own numbers instead – group sizes, current interventions, whatever you’re tracking now – and we’ll walk through where Mathletics’ assessments, grouping and data-driven reporting would make a measurable difference.
