Posts
 |
| Photo: Hiné Mizushima for Quanta Magazine |
If we could snap our fingers and change the way math and science are taught in U.S. schools, most of us would. The shortcomings of the current approach are clear. Subjects that are vibrant in the minds of experts become lifeless by the time they’re handed down to students. It’s not uncommon to hear kids in Algebra 2 ask, “When are we ever going to use this?” and for the teacher to reply, “Math teaches you how to think,” which is true — if only it were taught that way.
To say that this is now changing is to invite an eye roll. For a number of entrenched reasons, from the way teachers are trained to the difficulty of agreeing on what counts in each discipline, instruction in science and math is remarkably resistant to change.
That said, we’re riding the next big wave in K-12 science and math education in the United States. The main events are a pair of highly visible but often misunderstood documents — the Common Core math standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) — that, if implemented successfully, will boldly remake the way math and science are taught. Both efforts seek to recast instruction in the fundamental ideas and perspectives that animate the two fields.
“What we did in reorganizing the content of school mathematics was long overdue,” said Phil Daro, one of three lead authors of the Common Core math standards.
The changes go beyond the contentious new methods of teaching arithmetic that have grabbed headlines and threatened to blunt the momentum of Common Core math. Both documents developed out of decades of academic research on how children learn, and they reflect similar priorities. They exhibit an elegant rethinking of the basic structure of knowledge, along with new assertions of what’s important for students to be able to do by the time they finish high school.
“Overall, there’s a movement towards more complex cognitive mathematics, there’s a movement towards the student being invited to act like a mathematician instead of passively taking in math and science,” said David Baker, a professor of sociology and education at Pennsylvania State University. “These are big trends and they’re quite revolutionary.”
Pedagogical revolutions are chancy endeavors, however. The Common Core math standards were released in 2010 and NGSS in 2013. Now, years on, even enthusiastic early adopters of the Common Core like the state of New York are retreating from the standards. While the ultimate impact of both the Common Core and NGSS is still uncertain, it’s clear these standards go beyond simply swapping one set of textbooks for another — to really take hold, they’ll require a fundamental rethinking of everything from assessments to classroom materials to the basic relationship between teachers and students.
The Old New Math
NGSS and the Common Core are a significant departure from the way science and math have been taught, but they didn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, they’re consistent with a trend that’s been slow-boiling for a half-century.
In a 2010 paper, Baker and colleagues analyzed 141 elementary school math textbooks published between 1900 and 2000. They found that what kids were learning changed considerably during that period. Until the 1960s, basic arithmetic accounted for 85 percent of math instruction. By the end of the century that proportion had dropped to 64 percent, with the balance of instruction devoted to more complex topics like advanced arithmetic and geometry.
“When you step back historically and sociologically, it’s clear education has really ratcheted up along these cognitive dimensions,” Baker said. “The idea that education is like men’s ties and just goes through this cycle of wide and thin is not true.”
Pedagogy has shifted as well. During the same period in which students began to learn more complex mathematics, leaders in science and math education launched complementary pushes to teach students to think more like real scientists and mathematicians. These efforts included the “New Math” of the 1960s and similar plans that decade to teach science as an “enquiry into enquiry,” as one leading expert of the time put it. Later manifestations of the impulse away from rote instruction include curricular standards created by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in the 1980s and the enthusiasm for “inquiry-based” science in the 1990s.
All of these initiatives had the right idea, but their implementation was off, say developers of NGSS and Common Core math. “Inquiry” is a habit of mind among scientists, but in the 1990s it was taught as its own curricular topic: Last week we learned about DNA, this week we’re going to learn about inquiry.
“Inquiry became almost an empty word, where it didn’t really matter what the inquiry was about,” said Heidi Schweingruber, director of the Board on Science Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which provided guidance for the development of NGSS.
The same problem happened in math. For the last 50 years, reformers have wanted to teach kids to reason mathematically, to think nimbly about topics like quadratic equations that otherwise come off flat. Instead, in programs that employed the New Math, students often ended up playing logic games.
“The push toward conceptual understanding and understanding rich mathematical ideas sometimes ended in practice with students just engaged in activities and messing around,” said Robert Floden, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.
It’s not surprising that ambitious changes like these would be hard to implement. After all, teaching kids to adopt a scientific mindset is a subtler and more complex task than having them memorize the parts of a cell. For one thing, it requires teachers who inhabit that mindset themselves, and they’re harder to find. For another, it takes a more patient perspective than the prevailing one in public education, which expects teachers to post a learning objective on the board before each class and end every unit with a multiple-choice test.
Read more...
Source: Quanta Magazine
