<p>Another provocative “study”. Full text here: <a href=“Detroit Local News - Michigan News - Breaking News - detroitnews.com”>Detroit Local News - Michigan News - Breaking News - detroitnews.com;
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<p>I wonder what this really means? I wonder if high math scores are often built on memorization of techniques that work for the test but are quickly forgotten shortly thereafter. That would be my experience, and it might explain some of the lack of confidence in math ability vs. test scores.</p>
<p>On the other hand, that’s the way we tend to teach math in the US, so that probably doesn’t account for the disparity.</p>
<p>There are two issues here: one is another critique of the self-esteem movement; the other is math education as such.
I’ve already posted that elementary math teachers in the US are not adequately prepared to teach math according to a 1999 study by Liping Ma (Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics). Some districts and some homeschooling parents have found that the Singapore math curriculum is superior to math texts used in the US, ranging from traditional approaches (Saxon) to reform (TERC, Everyday Math). Tokenadult can speak more knowledgeably about this issue.</p>
<p>I did not see yet another issue in the article: language skills. More and more, word problems are assigned. These word problems are great as a means of testing not only if a student “knows” the math but when and how to use the math. For example, a student may know that 3x4=12. But the student has to recognize what is involved in a problem that states: “We will have 3 sets of problems. Each set will have 4 problems. How many problems will there be altogether?” Will anybody be surprised that this question arose in a 9th grade science (heterogeneous) class at my S’s high school and that when called on to answer, one student could not after 15 minutes?<br>
Word problems are more difficult for students with limited language skills; this is a problem in the US where so many students are recent immigrants. It may not be in most other countries.</p>
<p>Our newspaper ran this article yesterday and included a graph with the math scores and “math happiness” scores of about a dozen countries in a box. Places like Japan and Singapore were at the top of the competency range and the bottom of the happiness range. Our version of the article indicated that part of the happiness quotient was whether the student felt competent. A lot of the Japanese did not feel competent even tho’ they clearly were. Not unlike someone here who feels dumb when they don’t do as well as the other kids in the AP class or when they get a 750 on the SAT and wanted an 800. Psychologically one’s happiness depends in part on what one is comparing one’s self to. Japanese kids are comparing their math ability to standards much higher than a lot of our kids are.</p>
<p>If you want to get totally immersed in the math wars go to <a href=“http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com%5B/url%5D”>www.mathematicallycorrect.com</a>. The Lipping Ma article is there as well as stuff on the Singapore math texts. Personally I think this article touches on the fact that just 'cause you “feel good” about math doesn’t mean you can do it. There was something in ours about how kids who learned with real world examples did worse on the TIMMS test, and that did surprise me, but then maybe it depends on the overall method employed and not just the real world examples themselves.</p>
<p>Of particular note was the NCTM comment that if you don’t like math you won’t major in it, but if you can’t do math you can’t major in it (you’ll flunk out no matter how much you supposedly like it).</p>
<p>This is a good example of why newspapers should be careful in reporting on social science research. </p>
<p>Reports like this come from comparing two population means. I don’t know the details, as I have not taken the time (nor will I) to dig out the details, but I suspect the studies leading to the comparison were not even done together. Even if they were, the logical question is “So What?” Like so many things, the group norms are of questionable relevance to any individual, and of NO relevance to my kid.</p>
<p>Also, without a lot more data, we don’t know how significant these differences are to the broader world. Many population statistical differences are technically (in a statistical sense) significant, but so small that they are completely irrelevant to our ordinary existence, as the claimed effect is swamped in a sea of individual differences. </p>
<p>So maybe, just maybe the policy wonks shoudl care about this stuff. The rest of us can go back to sleep (or coffee or whatever). We’re not under threat or attack!</p>
<p>Edit: Even if the report claimed a correlation between high scores and low confidence, the lead for this thread is wrong. You can’t conclude that from the data. It could be equally true that low self confidence leads to high scores. Or more likely that something else leads to both. We don’t know.</p>
<p>The “happiness quotient” is a function of parenting styles. Chinese and Japanese parents do not generally lavish praise on their offspring. In turn, their children are not allowed to rest on their laurels with a pat on the head and a "Well done!"from their parents.</p>
<p>mercymom: The Liping Ma book is also used by the opponents of mathematically correct. Their take can be found at <a href=“http://www.mathematicallysane.com%5B/url%5D”>www.mathematicallysane.com</a>. In fact Ma does not advocate one way or the other in the American math wars.</p>
<p>Well, I tend to be in the mathematicallycorrect camp. After getting two kids through K12 and no.3 is in 11th grade (thank God in a school with awesome math teachers and the best calculus teacher on the planet, who is a woman btw), I sometimes feel like they survived the school system rather than actually benefitting from it. For various reasons they went to 3 different k8 schools and 2 high schools, some public and some private, and I saw way too much of the “feel good” NCTM math. Hence my knowledge of the mathematicallycorrect site. In fact, I only looked at it yesterday after several years off when I saw the newspaper article, since I had a pretty good idea what they were really getting at. The Brookings Institute’s Brown Center also issued some studies on the mc site.</p>
<p>My girls’ school finally got a really good calculus teacher (a man), but he had to spend the first nine weeks each year undoing the damage that had taken place in the earlier grades before he could move on to what he was actually supposed to be teaching. Sad.</p>
<p>Reform does not have to do with “feel good.” It’s a fallacy to mix up the two. Feel good can be used with more traditional pedagogy just as well as with a more reform approach. (Learned your multiplication tables? Wonderful!)
S basically learned math outside school; I do know that H, who had learned math in the traditional way, i.e. drill and skill, was adamant that S not be subjected to the same regime. He refused to make S memorize the multiplication tables, claiming, accurately in S’s case at least, that S would learn them by heart along the way.
But as is so often the case, each side of the math wars has adopted extreme positions (or at least rhetorical positions). There is a place for drill and skill, and there is a place for more a more reform based approach (ever wondered why reform was contemplated in the first place if the traditional method had been so successful?) But what has this to do with feel good baffles me.</p>
<p>Liping Ma’s book is not about feel good. It is about American teachers not understanding very basic math concepts (such as carry over) and thus being unable to teach it well to their students no matter what method is used. S had this experience with a teacher (really a humanities specialist) who stuck closely to the book as she could not explain the math on her own. He would have been better off just reading the book (and did).</p>