Mathematics education

In contemporary education, mathematics education is the practice of teaching and learning mathematics, along with the associated scholarly research.

Researchers in mathematics education are primarily concerned with the tools, methods and approaches that facilitate practice or the study of practice. However mathematics education research, known on the continent of Europe as the didactics or pedagogy of mathematics, has developed into an extensive field of study, with its own concepts, theories, methods, national and international organisations, conferences and literature. This article describes some of the history, influences and recent controversies.

A mathematics lecture at Helsinki University of Technology.

Contents

History

Illustration at the beginning of a 14th century translation of Euclid's Elements.

Elementary mathematics was part of the education system in most ancient civilisations, including Ancient Greece, the Roman empire, Vedic society and ancient Egypt. In most cases, a formal education was only available to male children with a sufficiently high status, wealth or caste.

In Plato's division of the liberal arts into the trivium and the quadrivium, the quadrivium included the mathematical fields of arithmetic and geometry. This structure was continued in the structure of classical education that was developed in medieval Europe. Teaching of geometry was almost universally based on Euclid's Elements. Apprentices to trades such as masons, merchants and money-lenders could expect to learn such practical mathematics as was relevant to their profession.

The first mathematics textbooks to be written in English and French were published by Robert Recorde, beginning with The Grounde of Artes in 1540.

In the Renaissance the academic status of mathematics declined, because it was strongly associated with trade and commerce. Although it continued to be taught in European universities, it was seen as subservient to the study of Natural, Metaphysical and Moral Philosophy.

This trend was somewhat reversed in the seventeenth century, with the University of Aberdeen creating a Mathematics Chair in 1613, followed by the Chair in Geometry being set up in University of Oxford in 1619 and the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics being established by the University of Cambridge in 1662. However, it was uncommon for mathematics to be taught outside of the universities. Isaac Newton, for example, received no formal mathematics teaching until he joined Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the industrial revolution led to an enormous increase in urban populations. Basic numeracy skills, such as the ability to tell the time, count money and carry out simple arithmetic, became essential in this new urban lifestyle. Within the new public education systems, mathematics became a central part of the curriculum from an early age.

By the twentieth century mathematics was part of the core curriculum in all developed countries.

During the twentieth century mathematics education was established as an independent field of research. Here are some of the main events in this development:

In the 20th century, the cultural impact of the "electric age" (McLuhan) was also taken up by educational theory and the teaching of mathematics. While previous approach focused on "working with specialized 'problems' in arithmetic", the emerging structural approach to knowledge had "small children meditating about number theory and 'sets'."[1]

Objectives

At different times and in different cultures and countries, mathematics education has attempted to achieve a variety of different objectives. These objectives have included:

Methods of teaching mathematics have varied in line with changing objectives.

Research

An increasing amount of research has been done in the area of mathematics education in the last few decades. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has summarized the state of current research in mathematics education in nine areas of current interest, as follows.[2] (Though the NCTM has special interest in American education, the research summarized is international in scope.)

What can we learn from research?
Instead of just looking at whether a particular program works, we must also look at why and under what conditions it works. Teachers can adapt tasks used in studies for their own classrooms. Individual studies are often inconclusive, so it is important to look at a consensus of many studies to draw conclusions. Theory can put practice in a new perspective. For example, research shows that when students invent their own algorithms first, and then learn the standard algorithm, they understand better and make fewer errors. Such findings can have an impact on classroom practice.
Homework
Homework which leads students to practice past lessons or prepare future lessons are more effective than those going over today's lesson. Assignments should be a mix of easy and hard problems and ideally based on the student's learning style. Students must receive feedback. Students with learning disabilities or low motivation may profit from rewards. Shorter homework is better than long homework and group homework is sometimes effective, though these findings depend on grade level. Homework helps simple skills, but not broader measures of achievement.
Student learning
Most bilingual adults switch languages when calculating. Such code-switching has no impact on math ability and should not be discouraged.
When studying statistics, children need time to explore, study and share reasoning about centers, shape, spread and variability. The ability to calculate averages does not mean students understand the concept of averages, which students conceptualize in a variety of ways—from a simplistic "typical value" to a deeper idea of "representative value." Learning when to use mean, median and mode is difficult.
Algebra
It is important for elementary school children to spend a long time learning to express algebraic properties without symbols before learning algebraic notation. When learning symbols, many students believe letters always represent unknowns and struggle with the concept of variable. They prefer arithmetic reasoning to algebraic equations for solving word problems. It takes time to move from arithmetic to algebraic generalizations to describe patterns. Students often have trouble with the minus sign and understand the equals sign to mean "the answer is...."
American Curriculum
The US National Research Council has found it difficult to evaluate any given program, but two general patterns have become clear from large-scale studies: (1) Students achieve greater conceptual understanding from standards-based curricula compared to traditional curricula. (2) Students achieve the same procedural skill level in both types of curricula as measured by traditional standardized tests.
Effective instruction
The two most important criteria for helping students gain conceptual understanding are making connections and intentionally struggling with important ideas. Research in the 70s and 80s concluded that skill efficiency is best attained by rapid pacing, direct traditional teaching and a smooth transition from teacher modeling to error-free practice. More recent research shows that students who learn skills in conceptually-oriented instruction are better able to adapt their skills to new situations.
Students with difficulties
Students with genuine difficulties (unrelated to motivation or past instruction) struggle with basic facts, answer impulsively, struggle with mental representations, have poor number sense and have poor short-term memory. Techniques that have been found productive for helping such students include peer-assisted learning, explicit teaching with visual aids, instruction informed by formative assessment and encouraging students to think aloud.
Formative assessment
Formative assessment is both the best and cheapest way to boost student achievement, student engagement and teacher professional satisfaction. Results surpass those of reducing class size or increasing teachers' content knowledge. Only short-term (within and between lessons) and medium-term (within and between units) assessment is effective. Effective assessment is based on clarifying what students should know, creating appropriate activities to obtain the evidence needed, giving good feedback, encouraging students to take control of their learning and letting students be resources for one another.
Mathematics specialists and coaches
Little research has been done so far on mathematics coaches and the studies that have been done are hard to evaluate because coaching is usually part of larger programs. What research has been done seems to show that coaches can improve teaching, but the coaching program must be well designed.

Rarity of randomized experiments

In the scholarly literature in mathematics education, relatively few articles report random experiments in which teaching methods were randomly assigned to classes.[3][4] Randomized experiments have been done to evaluate non-pedagogical programs in schools, such as programs to reduce teenage-pregnancy and to reduce drug use. [5] Randomized experiments were commonly done in educational psychology in the 1880s at American universities.[6][7] However, randomized experiments have been relatively rare in education in recent decades. In other disciplines concerned with human subjects, like biomedicine, psychology, and policy evaluation, controlled, randomized experiments remain the preferred method of evaluating treatments.[8][9] Educational statisticians and some mathematics educators have been working to increase the use of randomized experiments to evaluate teaching methods.[4]

Nonetheless, randomized experiments have been rare in the evaluation of teaching methods in recent years. For decades, many scholars in educational schools have argued against increasing the number of randomized experiments, often because of philosophical objections to the use of "quantitative" (or alleged "physical-scientific" or "positivist") methods on human subjects.[3] While statisticians and many mathematics educators have urged an increase in the number of randomized experiments---which again have been rare in most areas of pedagogy and didactics in recent decades---the scientific community recognizes that observational studies remain valuable in education---just as observational studies remain valuable in epidemiology, political science, economics, etc.[10] In the United States, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP) published a report based on only studies using randomized experiments; the NMAP report's exclusive reliance on randomized experiments received criticism from some scholars.[11]

Standards

Throughout most of history, standards for mathematics education were set locally, by individual schools or teachers, depending on the levels of achievement that were relevant to, realistic for, and considered socially appropriate for their pupils.

In modern times there has been a move towards regional or national standards, usually under the umbrella of a wider standard school curriculum. In England, for example, standards for mathematics education are set as part of the National Curriculum for England, while Scotland maintains its own educational system.

Ma (2000) summarised the research of others who found, based on nationwide data, that students with higher scores on standardised math tests had taken more mathematics courses in high school. This led some states to require three years of math instead of two. But because this requirement was often met by taking another lower level math course, the additional courses had a “diluted” effect in raising achievement levels. [12]

In North America, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has published the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. In 2006, they released the Curriculum Focal Points, which recommend the most important mathematical topics for each grade level through grade 8. However, these standards are not nationally enforced in US schools.

Content and age levels

Different levels of mathematics are taught at different ages and in somewhat different sequences in different countries. Sometimes a class may be taught at an earlier age than typical as a special or "honors" class.

Elementary mathematics in most countries is taught in a similar fashion, though there are differences. In the United States fractions are typically taught starting from 1st grade, whereas in other countries they are usually taught later, since the metric system does not require young children to be familiar with them. Most countries tend to cover fewer topics in greater depth than in the United States.[13]

In most of the US, algebra, geometry and analysis (pre-calculus and calculus) are taught as separate courses in different years of high school. Mathematics in most other countries (and in a few US states) is integrated, with topics from all branches of mathematics studied every year. Students in many countries choose an option or pre-defined course of study rather than choosing courses à la carte as in the United States. Students in science-oriented curricula typically study differential calculus and trigonometry at age 16-17 and integral calculus, complex numbers, analytic geometry, exponential and logarithmic functions, and infinite series their final year of secondary school.

Methods

The method or methods used in any particular context are largely determined by the objectives that the relevant educational system is trying to achieve. Methods of teaching mathematics include the following:

Mathematics teachers

The following people all taught mathematics at some stage in their lives, although they are better known for other things:

Mathematics educators

The following are some of the people who have had a significant influence on the teaching of mathematics at various periods in history:

See also

Aspects of mathematics education
  • Number sense
  • Pre-math skills
  • Van Hiele model (a theory of how children learn geometry)
  • Computer Based Mathematics Education
  • Anti-racist mathematics (using mathematics education to fight racism)
  • Cognitively Guided Instruction
General education
North American issues
  • Mathematics education in the United States
  • Reform mathematics
  • Traditional mathematics
Mathematical difficulties
  • Dyscalculia
  • Mathematical anxiety
  • Parity of zero - Example of a difficult concept for children
Other
  • Arithmetic for Parents
  • Handedness and mathematical ability
  • L - A Mathemagical Adventure (educational adventure game)
  • Make 10: A Journey of Numbers (a puzzle/logic style adventure game)
  • Math worksheet generator
  • Statistics education
  • QuickSmart

References

  1. ↑ Marshall McLuhan (1964) Understanding Media, p.13 [1]
  2. ↑ Research clips and briefs
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Thomas D. Cook, Randomized Experiments in Educational Policy Research: A Critical Examination of the Reasons the Educational Evaluation Community has Offered for Not Doing Them, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24 (2002), no. 3, 175-199.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Richard Scheaffer, ed. Working Group on Statistics in Mathematics Education Research (Richard Scheaffer, Martha Aliaga, Marie Diener-West, Joan Garfield, Traci Higgins, Sterling Hilton, Gerunda Hughes, Brian Junker, Henry Kepner, Jeremy Kilpatrick, Richard Lehrer, Frank K. Lester, Ingram Olkin, Dennis Pearl, Alan Schoenfeld, Juliet Shaffer, Edward Silver, William Smith, F. Michael Speed, and Patrick Thompson, Using Statistics Effectively in Mathematics Education Research: A report from a series of workshops organized by the American Statistical Association with funding from the National Science Foundation. The American Statistical Association, 2007.
  5. ↑ Cook.
  6. ↑ Stephen M. Stigler (November 1992). "A Historical View of Statistical Concepts in Psychology and Educational Research". American Journal of Education 101 (1): pp. 60–70. 
  7. ↑ Trudy Dehue (December 1997). "Deception, Efficiency, and Random Groups: Psychology and the Gradual Origination of the Random Group Design". Isis 88 (4): pp. 653–673. 
  8. ↑ Shadish, William R., Cook, Thomas D., & Campbell, Donald T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-61556-9. 
  9. ↑ See articles on NCLB, National Mathematics Advisory Panel, Scientifically-based research and What Works Clearinghouse
  10. ↑ Raudenbush, Stephen (2005), "Learning from Attempts to Improve Schooling: The Contribution of Methodological Diversity", Educational Researcher 34 (5): 25-31, http://edr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/5/25 .
  11. ↑ Kelly, Anthony (2008), "Reflections on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel Final Report", Educational Researcher 37 (9): 561-564, http://edr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/9/561  This is the introductory article to an issue devoted to this debate on report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, particularly on its use of randomized experiments.
  12. ↑ Ma, X. (2000). A longitudinal assessment of antecedent course work in mathematics and subsequent mathematical attainment. Journal of Educational Research, 94, 16-29.
  13. ↑ http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/report/final-report.pdf (E.g., p. 20)
  14. ↑ Freddie Mercury Interview, Melody Maker, May 2, 1981

Further reading

External links

Teacher organisations and others associated with mathematics education

Scholarly journals: print

Scholarly journals: on-line

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