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A presidential panel said yesterday that America's math education system was "broken," and it called on schools to ensure children from preschool to middle school master key skills.
...
F. Joseph Merlino, project director for the Math Science Partnership of Greater Philadelphia, which runs a research program involving 125 schools in 46 school districts, said that while he agreed with the finding that "you can't teach so many topics that you aren't able to get into depth," he disagreed with the report's focus on improving algebra instruction as central to better math education for all students.
He said he favored tailoring math instruction to the learning styles of students more than the report does. (emphasis added)
Philadelphia Inquirer, Panel: Math education is 'broken' The presidential panel called for ways to improve teaching and fight "math anxiety."
Bear in mind that in 2005, only 15.8% of black 11th graders in Philadelphia performed at the proficient level or above on the state math test. This placed them 2.61 standard deviations below the mean pass rate of 52.8% in Pennsylvania. This places these students below the first percentile.
See here.
I guess they haven't found the right learning style for these students yet.
14 comments:
I think we need to adapt to meet the learning styles of the administrators. Perhaps some clowns would be of help - or maybe a giant puppet?
I'll start to take "learning styles" seriously when I see signs for "Auditory Learners' School of Driving" or "Air Traffic Controllers' Licensing for the Kinesthetic Learner."
Why discriminate in favor of "visual learners"?
In fact almost all learning is multimodal/multisensory in some ways.
I'm a math coach in a 'failing' school district. In a meeting with our district's turn around partner (highly paid consultant) I had to listen to a diatribe about how we weren't properly using the pictures in the text to inspire the children!
Yup! That's it, better picture integration. Nothing about the high altitude content grazing that has kids, who can't add, subtract, or multiply, working on long division.
If we just put a little more lipstick on the pig our troubles will be over.
[He said he favored tailoring math instruction to the learning styles of students more than the report does.]
Yeah, learning styles.
The most common "learning style" I've encountered is apathy, laziness, not paying attention, dreadful work habits, goofing off...
The highly paid consultants need to go.
My district is now paying many thousands of dollars to the "Tri State Consortium" to tell us Math Trailblazers is great, our 5th graders are critical thinkers, and the problem lies in the "traditional environment" one finds in mathematics instruction in the middle & high school.
Compare and contrast:
A good private school, when it comes time to evaluate its programs, asks professors in the subject matter areas to visit & vet.
The Brentwood School, in LA, asked Ed to evaluate their history program, which he did.
His fee?
Nothing.
He did it gratis; evaluating history programs is a professional responsibility.
I'll start to take "learning styles" seriously when I see signs for "Auditory Learners' School of Driving" or "Air Traffic Controllers' Licensing for the Kinesthetic Learner."
right
that's my line about tutors
nobody hires tutors to help their kids discover their own meaning
This is the first time that I have run across your blog. Thank you for the posts!
I'm also very frustrated with the (under)developments in math education, but I am encouraged by the Math Panel's report in that I hope that parents across the nation will use the panel's list of Major Topics to ensure that their districts are indeed preparing students for success in mathematics as well as other fields.
The 1999 Toolbox study indicated "Of all pre-college curricula, the highest level of mathematics one studies in secondary school has the strongest continuing influence on bachelor's degree completion. Finishing a course beyond the level of Algebra 2 (for example, trigonometry or pre-calculus) more than doubles the odds that a student who enters postsecondary education will complete a bachelor's degree.
[pp. 16-18]"
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/Toolbox/index.html
Clearly, having the opportunity to learn appropriate mathematics can better prepare our children to reach their full potential!
We must focus on the CONTENT, and not be distracted.
I've been disturbed to see a lot of support for Reform Math programs coming from racist generalizations about "learning styles."
E.g., Daniel Orey, a Cal State math ed prof, argues in his "Ethnomathematical Perspectives on the NCTM Standards," that 'minorities' (his term) have more social, less analytical learning styles than Anglo-Americans do.
Similarly, UNC ed profs Carol and William Malloy (both African American, I believe) argue in "Issues of Culture in Mathematics Teaching and Learning" that African American students are less analytical and more holistic, and (favoring group work over solo work) less individualistic and more attuned to the interdependence of people and the environment.
People like these are doing a terrible disservice to those whom they purport to be helping.
Yes, the racist aspect certainly rears its ugly head -- and I am surprised it isn't noted by the Equity Police. In my district there is a real push to get teachers to include "learning style" (pseudo)information on students' IEPs. Over time I have noticed a clear bias in favor of black children being labeled "kinesthetic learners," Asian kids "visual learners" and white kids "auditory/visual learners" or having " verbal/logical intelligence" using Multiple Intelligence jargon.
When I am invited to these meetings I invariably ask the person doing the labeling, "What assessment data did you use to formulate your diagnosis ?"
No one has ever had any, just "observation," usually that the student is out of his seat a lot or prefers Lego to seatwork. I ask if they are familiar with 30+ years of research into "modality matching," aptitude/treatment interaction" and "learning styles." I get blank looks.
I look at the psychological assessment of the student to see if anything in there diagnoses a "learning style." Nada. Psychologists know better (at least ours do.) They will include suggestions on using students' cognitive strengths in their report, but not based on something so categorical as a "learning style."
When you say X is a "kinesthetic learner," you are basically saying, "forget all that higher-level thinking; algebra, critical reasoning, abstraction, language and mathematics are not for you, you can only learn with your hands. Off to McJobs!" Of course the people bandying about these stereotypes don't realize the import of what they're saying -- black kids better stick to menial labor -- but it's the soft underbelly of the crocodile.
Instead of being fixated on fictitious "learning styles", educationists would advance the educational enterprise considerably if they focused on a number of crucial intelligences as yet undiscovered by Howard Gardner.
As Gardner ponders new intelligences, it might serve the learning enterprise much better to adopt the intelligences discovered by Will Fitzhugh and posted at Right on the Left Coast:
In keeping with that view, I offer the following suggestions of Alternative Multiple Intelligences whose development should be most likely to contribute to the education of the majority of our students. Perhaps the most important is Paying Attention Intelligence. Without paying attention, it is truly astounding how much instruction even the average student is capable of ignoring on any given day, and as the word suggests, ignoring is the primrose path to Ignorance. Memorization Intelligence is seen as old fashioned, except when it applies to the names of music groups, sports or movie stars, and clothing or soft drink brands. Nevertheless, if students don’t remember anything, that is pretty close to the same thing as their not knowing anything. If a student is asked for the dates of the United States Civil War or the name of the first female Secretary of Labor, and she says, “I don’t remember,” that is the functional equivalent, for all practical purposes, of admitting, “I don’t know.”
Of course there is a storm of debate among professional educators, or rather between professional educators and the rest of the country, over the importance of knowledge as such, with the educators coming down on the side of correct sentiment fueled by general ignorance and propaganda, but let us put that aside for the moment. If one can accept, at least provisionally, that some knowledge may be useful for some purpose as an outcome of education, then Recognition Intelligence and Recall Intelligence, so useful on tests of knowledge, become central as well. When it comes to writing, I would argue, in the face of the united opposition from the National Council of Teachers of American English, that Punctuation Intelligence and Spelling Intelligence are also essential.
Another often neglected but vital talent for students is Hard Work Intelligence or Diligence Intelligence. We have so often in recent decades taught students that creativity is far more important than work, and that if they are not the smartest student in the class they should give up trying to do their academic work and fall back on their innate creativity and capacity for having fun instead...
There are many other neglected Intelligences not supported by Professor Gardner, such as Courtesy Intelligence, Time Management Intelligence, Turning in Homework Intelligence, Papers in on Time Intelligence, Seeking Extra Help Intelligence, Taking Personal Responsibility Intelligence, Asking Questions Intelligence, etc. In these cases, at least, it seems Tradition still Knows Best...
When you say X is a "kinesthetic learner," you are basically saying, "forget all that higher-level thinking; algebra, critical reasoning, abstraction, language and mathematics are not for you, you can only learn with your hands. Off to McJobs!"
oh, gosh, yes
I'll get Vicki Snider's observations on this typed up.
She has a nice passage where she talks about being a visual learner (iirc) for content she doesn't understand well and a verbal/analytic learner (or some such) for content she does understand.
I'm definitely in favor of recall intelligence.
Speaking of which, I took an ALEKS assessment and didn't remember how to do a sin & cosine problem.
Very frustrating.
At least one African-American scholar refutes the idea that there's a unique African-American learning style:
Craig L. Frisby.
Frisby, C. L. (1993). One giant step backward: Myths of black cultural learning styles.School Psychology Review, 22,535-557.
The basic ideas in the article are summarized at this review at Learning point Associates--Why Do Achievement Gaps Exist? and Learning Point Associates--Researcher Critiques Assumptions
Here's the rest of Frisby's scholarly works, according to his faculty web page.
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