Tag Archive for 'math'

“Reverse Engineering Academic Upbringing”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 19, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Higher Education and accountability. 1 Comment

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is launching an ambitious research project to figure out why so many of its freshmen need remediation in reading and math.  Every incoming student will be evaluated “to reverse-engineer his academic upbringing,” UNLV president Neal Smatresk tells the Las Vegas Sun.  Since eighty percent of UNLV’s undergrads come from a single source, the state’s own Clark County School District, Smatresk hopes to gain particularly vivid insights.

Data gathered from the academic assessments would be shared with school districts and could help educators identify and correct patterns of weakness, whether it be general flaws in teaching philosophies or student study habits.  Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said the research findings could offer important insight into the root causes of the problems requiring remediation.

“The possibility that the district will be able to identify clusters of underachieving students, and trace them to not only individual campuses but individual classrooms, has Clark County’s teachers union on edge,” the paper notes. 

Last year, more than a third of Nevada’s high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million.

New NAEP Numbers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 28, 2009 in No category. 2 Comments

NAEP long-term trend numbers are out.  Headlines and links:

Improvements seen in reading and mathematics

Black students make greater gains from early 1970s than White students

Most racial/ethnic score gaps narrow compared to first assessment

For students whose parents did not finish high school, mathematics scores increase compared to 1978

Percentages of students taking higher-level mathematics increasing

USA Today’s Greg Toppo highlights sharp increases in math and reading among many of the nation’s lowest-performing students. especially in the past four years, but notes “the stubborn, decades-long achievement gap between white and minority students shrank between the 1970s and the first part of this decade, but has barely budged since 2002, when the federal government compelled public schools to address it through No Child Left Behind (NCLB).” 

Over at Curriculum Matters, Mary Ann Zehr notes average scores have remained flat for 17-year-olds both in reading and math since the early 1970s.  “The scores for 17-year-olds in reading, however, did increase by three points, to 286, from 2004 to 2008, which is considered significant. But the same was not true for 17-year-olds in math. The scores remained stagnant for that age group in math during that same period,” she notes.

Dollars and/or Cents…To Verizon, There’s No Difference

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 7, 2009 in Humor. 7 Comments

What’s the difference between $.002 and .002¢?  In the case of this customer complaint captured by failblog.org, the difference amounts to about $70 dollars on a phone bill.  Alas, a customer service rep and a supervisor at Verizon refuse to accept they’re not the same amount.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=lCJ3Oz5JVKs">http://youtube.com/watch?v=lCJ3Oz5JVKs</a>

Two things to do right away: Check your phone bill to make sure you haven’t been overcharged because of sloppy math.  Then sell any stock you have in Verizon.

And while we’re on the subject of bad math in business, here’s a sign that fails on several levels.  And before you’re tempted to conclude that the sign is correct because the customer is saving negative $49, do the math:

TIMSS: Solid, Spectacular, Troubling or Dismal?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 10, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Education News and Research and Reports. 6 Comments

Results of the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) were released Tuesday, and the data proves to be a bit of an educational Rorschach Test.  The New York Times sees “solid achievement gains” in math by U.S. 4th and 8th graders, and “spectacular progress” by students in Minnesota and Massachsetts, while science performance remained flat nationwide.  “The results showed that several Asian countries continued to outperform the United States greatly in science and math,” notes the Times, “subjects that are crucial to economic competitiveness and research.”

USA Today’s Greg Toppo sees American students “consistently better than average,” but notes that “if there were a math-and-science Olympics for elementary and middle schoolers…the USA never quite makes it to the medal podium.”

At Flypaper, the Fordham Foundation finds reasons to be cheerful.  “American students have made steady gains in mathematics performance over the past decade. This progress was especially noteworthy at the eighth grade level, where the U.S. made gains since 1995 that were at least as strong as all of our major economic competitors.”  Diane Ravitch disagrees however that 8th grade gains are “noteworthy.”

The gains posted by 8th graders are certainly not a vindication of No Child Left Behind’s testing regime. Eighth-graders registered a 12-point gain in math from 1995-2003, before the imposition of NCLB testing. They posted a 4-point gain from 2003-2007. The students who were tested by TIMSS in 2007 had been subject to NCLB annual tests in every year from third grade onward, yet their scores did not show a dramatic improvement. If anything, the gains were no greater (and possibly smaller) than those registered pre-NCLB.

Democratic Congressman George Miller sees “significant gains” in 4th grade math, but tells the Washington Post it’s “troubling that our students are still behind their international peers in both math and science.”  Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, tells USA Today that the new TIMSS results belie complaints that U.S. students are lagging behind the rest of the world in math. “It’s just not true,” he says. “It hasn’t been true for a long time.”  Meanwhile the National Science Teachers Association pronounces itself “discouraged” by the results, noting science scores for minority students are “dismal.”  Many districts simply do not value science education, says a statement released by the NSTA Tuesday. ”Science is being eliminated from many K-6 classrooms.”

Behold The Writeulator!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 1, 2008 in Education Practice. 1 Comment

What if there was a writeulator? wonders Paul, a public school math teacher who blogs at When Galaxies Collide.  Arguing against the widespread use of calculators in math class, he imagines what would happen to a student’s writing skills if there was an ELA version of a calculator.

To use it, you simply type in four sentence fragments; one for character development, one for causality, another for conflict, and the last for a bit of complication. Then you plug the device into a computer through its little port and push the writeulate button. Voila! On the computer you get a complete short story. All the nasty spelling, sentence structure, plot, and paragraph development is done for you by the writulator and the output is delivered nicely wrapped in Microsoft Word.  Far fetched? Sure! But, think for a moment what such a device would do for your writing skills. Even more frighteningly, think of what it would do for your ability to even speak a coherent sentence.

A writeulator would disrupt the connection between a thought and its alphabet, just as calculators disconnect numbers from mathematical reasoning.  ”Fluency with multiplication facts makes you fluent in factors,” Paul writes. ”Factors make you fluent in division. And so it goes, on and on through the magnificent and ancient hierarchy of mathematics. Every such trip, strenghens your lower level skills and builds insights that are cut short by a calculator.”

Math Scores: U.S. Cities vs. The World

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 23, 2008 in No category. 0 Comments

Students in six major U.S. cities–Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Houston, New York and San Diego–are performing as well or better in mathematics than 4th and 8th graders in other countries, according to a new study by the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

However, students from five other major cities–Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, the District of Columbia and Los Angeles–are performing below the international average, and sometimes well below.  The research compares data on the U.S. cities math performance in the NAEP 2007 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) in  Mathematics with international numbers culled from the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). 

USA Today looks at the numbers and concludes “Fourth- and eighth-grade students in…Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Houston, New York City and San Diego actually hold their own against international competitors from Singapore, Japan, England and elsewhere.”  That’s an overly generous description given that Singapore has 73% of its 8th graders proficient in math; Japan has 57%; while the top U.S. cities in the study, Charlotte and Austin, have a proficiency rate of 34%.  However, the international TIMSS average among 8th graders is a mere 21%.  For it’s part AIR concludes:

The findings in this report reinforce the fact that neither the typical student in the United States or in any of the 11 urban districts has achieved the Proficient level of performance found in Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Chinese Taipei, and Japan. If the United States is counting on today’s mathematics education to seed the future technology and science needed to carry our cities and our nation forward, then we are already at a competitive disadvantage.

A press release on the study is here.  The full report is here.

Algebra II

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 22, 2008 in Educational Policy and Teaching. 0 Comments

“If we want kids to master algebra by eighth, we need to focus at least as much energy on getting them proficient in whole number operations by fourth,” writes the New America Foundation’s Sara Mead, commenting on today’s Brookings report.  “That’s a lot harder than simply mandating algebra for all eighth graders, but in the long term the results will be much better.”

Just so.

Counterfeit Equity

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 22, 2008 in Educational Policy and Research and Reports. 5 Comments

Twenty years ago, only one in six U.S. 8th graders studied algebra.  Thanks to a national push dating back to the Clinton administration, today more of them take algebra than any other math course.  Take it, yes.  But are they learning it?

A new report from the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless notes many students are being pushed into algebra without having mastered basic skills such as multiplication, division and fractions.  Among the poorest math students, nearly one in three were taking advanced math.  As Loveless’ report, “The Misplaced Math Student: Lost in Eighth Grade Algebra,” notes:

These students tend to be some of the nation’s most vulnerable children. We already know that they struggle at mathematics, scoring among the bottom 10 percent of all eighth graders in the country. They also possess characteristics that make recovery from a lost year of math instruction unlikely.

The push to make algebra universal was about increasing educational equity. ”It’s really counterfeit equity,” Loveless tells USA Today, noting that the mismatch inordinately affects black, Hispanic and poor kids in urban schools.

The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, a booster of 8th grade algebra for all, says the Brookings report is giving him second thoughts.  “It would be better to think of algebra as we do swimming,” he writes. “Something everyone should learn, but most importantly learn well. Get everyone into the pool as soon as possible. But let’s not mark them as having passed the course until we are sure they can swim several lengths without drowning.”

 

 

Georgia Parents Demand Math Basics

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 10, 2008 in Curriculum and Parents. 1 Comment

A controversial math curriculum in Georgia is being expanded to the state’s high schools.  That’s raising the eyebrows and the ire of parents, who notes test scores in the Peachtree State haven’t exactly been lights out in math.  The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports 38 percent of the state’s eighth-graders failed the state’s new, redesigned math exam, which was based on harder material.

“While parents and teachers expected some students to struggle with the new math, they were shocked by the high failure rates,” the paper notes. 

After years of criticism that the state’s math curriculum was too weak, the Georgia Department of Education drastically changed the way students learn the subject. Officials adopted an “integrated” design, which weaves elements of algebra, geometry and statistics into a single math class, rather than teaching each separately. Elementary-school students use more hands-on activities to learn about numbers, geometry, multiplication and division. Middle school students learn some of the algebra previously taught in high school.

A parents group called Georgia Parents for Math wants more emphasis should be placed on math theory and basic concepts.  “We have not come up with some foreign math,” Martha Reichrath, deputy superintendent for the state Education Department, tells the AJC. “It is an enriched math. Our students will do better with this math. I do believe we will be the national leader in math.”

The Innumeracy of Intellectuals

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 6, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Higher Education. 1 Comment

Inside Higher Ed“I know nothing about art or music,” writes Chad Orzel at Inside Higher Ed. “I don’t know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I’m not even sure those are both art terms.” Orzel, is not a high school student, or even a middle school student. He’s a professor of physics at Union College.

Given my line of work, this doesn’t rise to the level of a liability, but it’s awkward. I’m a professor at a liberal arts college, putting me solidly in the “Intellectual” class, and there’s a background assumption that anyone with as much education as I have will know something about history and philosophy and literature and art and classical music….On those occasions when I’m forced to admit my ignorance (or, worse yet, the fact that I don’t even like classical music), my colleagues tend to look a little sideways at me, and I can feel myself drop slightly in their estimation. Not knowing anything about those subjects makes me less of an Intellectual to most people in the academy.

Alas, it’s a one-way street. Intellectuals in the humanities don’t look askance at those who confess an ignorance of math or science. In fact, it’s something of a badge of honor. “Students seeking to avoid math or science classes can expect to get a sympathetic hearing from much of the academy,” Orzel writes, “where the grousing of physics majors is written off as whining by nerds who badly need to expand their narrow minds.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think the lack of respect for math and science is one of the largest unacknowledged problems in today’s society. And it starts in the academy — somehow, we have moved to a place where people can consider themselves educated while remaining ignorant of remarkably basic facts of math and science. If I admit an ignorance of art or music, I get sideways looks, but if I argue for taking a stronger line on math and science requirements, I’m being unreasonable. The arts are essential, but Math Is Hard, and I just need to accept that not everybody can handle it.

“It simply should not be acceptable for people who are ignorant of math and science to consider themselves Intellectuals,” Orzel concludes. “Somehow, we need to move away from where we are and toward a place where confusing Darwin with Dawkins or Feynman with Faraday carries the same intellectual stigma as confusing Bach with Beethoven or Rembrandt with Reubens.”