Pardon the cynicism, but why on earth would the Ministry of Education release a report late on a Friday before a long weekend, if not to bury bad news?

The National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement 2013 found that only 41 percent of [approximately 2000] Year 8 students achieved at Level 4 or higher on the KAMSI assessment. The curriculum expectation at Year 8 is that students will be working solidly at Level 4.

It is hardly any wonder that older primary school children are failing to grasp maths fundamentals such as fractions and decimals. Too many of them are still muddling their way through the list of whole number strategies, such as “doubling and having”, “tripling and thirding”. Assuming they have already learned how to perform column-based multiplication (which many of them haven’t), their time would be better spent experiencing decimals, fractions and percentages in a variety of ways. And I don’t mean colouring in pictures of fractions; I mean learning how to actually do maths with these numbers.

A curriculum that emphasises practice and mastery of the basics would give all children, regardless of their ethnicity or socio-economic background, the best chances of success with maths. Just look at what one Decile 1 school teacher and her students, mostly Pasifika and Maori, achieved in just five months.

We don’t have to wait for the Ministry to tell our teachers what to do; we can’t afford to. The path ahead is obvious. Let’s just get on with it.

Dr Audrey Tan, Mathmo Consulting
May 2015

Report finds Kiwi kids are failing to grasp maths fundamentals – National – NZ Herald News
Maths standards achieved by New Zealand children are sliding dramatically between their fourth and eighth years at school. – New Zealand Herald
nzherald.co.nz

“Too many education reforms are failing to measure success or failure in the classroom,” said Dr Andreas Schleicher. He is right, but in 2009, New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) concluded that “…over the 12 years from 1997 to 2009 there has been a small net improvement in mathematics performance at year 4 level (held back from a larger improvement by the decline between 2001 and 2005 in basic fact knowledge), and essentially no net change in mathematics performance at year 8 level.”

So we did have an effective evaluation in place. What happened next? NEMP got shut down and the new curriculum remains intact. It really is time for parents and teachers to demand something better from the Ministry of Education.

School reforms ‘need to be tested’
Trillions of dollars are spent on education reforms around the world without any effective evaluation to see if changes have worked, says the OECD.
bbc.com

“A review of more than 200 research studies to identify teaching elements with the strongest evidence of improving attainment was published by the UK’s Sutton Trust in October 2014. It identified common practices that have no grounding in research but can be harmful, including using praise lavishly, allowing learners to discover key ideas by themselves, grouping students by ability and presenting information to students based on their preferred learning style.” – Emeritus Prof. William Reville

The reason why modern teaching methods don’t work
Whole-class teaching, in which children learn to use their long-term memory, has been abandoned for a more personalised, naturalistic approach, and it’s been a disaster.

irishtimes.com

This is an amazing interview with Assoc. Prof. Anna Stokke, co-founder of WISE Math in Canada. If you can, please find a quiet half-hour to listen to it. It’s long, but it covers everything you need to know about the current state of primary maths education in western countries.

Frankly, there is nothing more that needs to be said. After listening to this podcast, you’ll be thinking…’this makes perfect sense, so WHY are we still fighting the fight??’

John Gerritsen asks why New Zealand students have been performing so badly in maths and science, and whether we will see any improvement with this year’s cohort.

Sadly, in the entire 27-minute report, there’s nothing to suggest the Ministry of Education is doing anything at all to address the Numeracy Project. Instead, (22:14) “the greatest potential for change lies with teachers themselves”, and “helping teachers to do that is everyone’s responsibility, not just the Ministry’s”.

It is not right that the Ministry spent $70M getting us into this mess and now it’s everyone’s responsibility to help the teachers out of it, but at least some of us are indeed taking up that responsibility. We have to, for the sake of our children.

Hard-hitting words from Professor Stephen Dinham, Chair of Teacher Education and Director of Learning and Teaching at the University of Melbourne, Australia. From the abstract of his Keynote Address to the Australian College of Educators National Conference last week:

“Australian primary students are out-performed by their secondary peers in relative terms on international measures of student achievement. This paper explores some explanations for this discrepancy including the role of content knowledge in primary curricula, a general lack of an evidence base for teaching and learning in primary education with a propensity to adopt fads and fashions and the increasingly unrealistic and untenable expectations placed on primary teachers and schools.

A solid research evidence base for teacher pre-service and in-service teacher education is essential and there is a need to question from this basis of evidence current practices and untested assumptions underpinning primary teaching and schooling.

If such transformation can’t be achieved, coupled with a rethinking of the expectations held for primary schools and primary teachers, then further decline in relative and absolute terms seems inevitable.”

Primary school teaching ‘based on pseudoscience’
Pupils being experimented on with methods rooted in folklore, dogma, ritual and untested assumptions, Australian College of Educators president to say
theguardian.com | by Bridie Jabour

Benjamin Riley, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the NewSchools Venture Fund, USA, has just completed a seven month fellowship in New Zealand, visiting schools all over the country. His report is incredibly timely for us, just as we call upon everyone in the education community – teachers, parents and students – to demand better standards and appeal to scientific evidence for improved teaching practices worldwide.

In his report, he describes the Numeracy Project as one of two “vexing” issues. From the section “Suspicions around the Numeracy Project”:

‘At one urban decile 10 school,…the lead teacher responsible for mathematics suspected that the Numeracy Project had “swung the pendulum too far” in teaching strategies to solve maths problems rather than developing mathematical content knowledge and fluency in algorithms. A secondary school mathematics teacher…was even more critical: ‘They can say what they want, but repetition is key [to learning basic maths facts]. We almost need to start from scratch with students, and undo bad practices…Their basic number skills are bad. They come in and cannot divide at all. They do not see multiplication as multiple addition. Kids [are being given] too many strategies, they can’t decide which is better. In maths, there should be freedom…but there is also order.’

There is also a footnote with an enigmatic statement from the Ministry of Education:

‘After reviewing a draft of this report, the Ministry offered the following comment: “There are a number of studies locally which reach similar conclusions to those in the report, and which are consistent with international studies. These conclude that there is a need for more developed and fluent number knowledge in the early years and more systematic teaching in specific areas such as place value and early algebraic knowledge”. Whether this confirms the Numeracy Project is being phased out or not I’m not entirely sure.’

What do you think?

This excellent article points out the faulty logic of certain educationists.

“Proponents of inquiry-based instruction often claim that many adults struggle with math, citing this as proof that their unsubstantiated techniques should be adopted in math classrooms. While it is true that some adults struggle with math, this is not an argument for adopting inquiry-based learning any more than it’s an argument for using jumping jacks to teach kids math since inquiry-based learning has not been shown effective…. It is incorrect and insulting to great teachers of past years to argue that instructional techniques used with previous generations did not produce creative problem solvers.” – Assoc. Prof. Anna Stokke