As a leader of the UCLA-based California Mathematics Project for the past 27 years, I have spent my career making sure more students can learn meaningful math. So I usually celebrate news coverage of math education.
But recent messages coming from some university math faculty are downright disturbing.
In one op-ed, a professor who lectures to groups of 500 to 1,400 students claims to know within one week “who is in trouble.”
Another says thousands of students are being placed “at the mercy of a coin flip, risking academic disaster.”
Yet another said of an incoming UC Berkeley freshman she had met, “The probability that he will survive his first Berkeley calculus course, even with a barely passing grade, is 50-50.”
Before joining the Math Project, an initiative of the University of California that supports teachers in developing effective instructional strategies and deepening their content knowledge, I was a middle and high school math teacher. I am not surprised that some students struggle with mathematics.
What is surprising is this refrain from math educators predicting students’ failure as opposed to supporting their success. High expectations from teachers are a component of high-quality instruction. So are positive relationships between teachers and students.
And yet, a reality underlies the faculty concerns: Math education conditions in many K-12 schools are not good. There are students with gaps in their learning.
A Mathematics Association of America study of college calculus instruction found that two of the three characteristics of good calculus instruction were (1) positive classroom interactions that encourage student engagement and (2) “encouraging and available instructors” who “care about students’ learning, believe in students’ abilities, and … see students as capable of taking more calculus courses.”
And yet, a reality underlies the faculty concerns: Math education conditions in many K-12 schools are not good. There are students with gaps in their learning. The pandemic and use of social media accelerated the problem, but there are other longstanding issues, including ones higher education is well-positioned to address.
One of the biggest problems is the shortage of experienced teachers. While most schools face challenges hiring math teachers, California’s highest-need schools, where more than 20% of math teachers are inexperienced, are particularly vulnerable.
Our public universities have a responsibility to serve students from across California, including high-performing students from high-need schools. And yet, they are producing about half as many teachers as they were 20 years ago. Credential programs for math teachers and K-5 math specialists need to be expanded. If public universities aren’t recruiting, training and supporting future math teachers, who will?
Secondly, too many teachers are teaching from an old playbook: “I’m going to teach you math and I want you to memorize it just in case you ever need it.” We cover the rules for fractions, but we don’t teach students what a fraction is, conceptually, or how to apply their knowledge. Years later, faced with advanced topics like rational functions or phase shifts in trigonometry, their foundation may not support them.
Mathematics education research — including by UC faculty — has guided us away from teacher-driven pedagogical strategies and toward more student-centered, collaborative ways of learning. The National Research Council’s 2001 strands for mathematical proficiency — conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning and productive disposition — were an early articulation of this.
Updated, active learning approaches are not the norm in high schools. Many colleges repeat that mistake, particularly when placing students needing support in lecture halls with hundreds of students. Students served by traditional lecture-based STEM courses are “1.5 times more likely to fail than students in courses with active learning,” according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Leadership from higher education paired with investment from the state can help change classroom practices to reflect evidence-based teaching.
Some UC campuses have refashioned their math courses to be interactive and relevant. UCLA’s Math for Life Scientists course was designed to improve students’ mathematical foundations for biology, rather than weed out students who found math challenging. We need more examples like this.
Lastly, measuring the problem and issuing reports is not enough. As a high school math teacher, I learned that the most important role for assessments is to give teachers insight into what students understand. The Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project, or MDTP, used by thousands of secondary math teachers across the state, is designed to help teachers plan instruction, and schools are told not to use the test for placement. I used it to provide just-in-time instruction on concepts when students needed them.
Once we start using a test such as that primarily to predict which students will fail, we are gatekeeping, not teaching.
Sure, selective universities have gates, and they need to decide who to let inside. But an even higher commitment is to use their expertise and resources to partner with K-12 schools to cultivate a math education pipeline in which more students can thrive, regardless of where they go to college.
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Kyndall Brown is the former executive director of the California Mathematics Project, based at UCLA.
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This story was originally published by EdSource.