

U.S. Education Assessment Shows Modest but Steady Gains in Math Scores - zeratul
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=american-math-scores

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tokenadult
Professor Hung-hsi Wu of the University of California Berkeley writes many
interesting articles about mathematics education reform in the United States.

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/>

In one of Professor Wu's recent lectures,

<http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Lisbon2010_4.pdf>

he points out a problem of fraction addition from the federal National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) survey project (the same "Nation's
Report Card" mentioned in the article submitted here). On page 39 of his
presentation handout (numbered in the .PDF of his lecture notes as page 38),
he shows the fraction addition problem

12/13 + 7/8

for which eighth grade students were not even required to give a numerically
exact answer, but only an estimate of the correct answer to the nearest
natural number from five answer choices, which were

(a) 1

(b) 19

(c) 21

(d) I don't know

(e) 2

The statistics from the federal test revealed that for their best estimate of
the sum of 12/13 + 7/8,

7 percent of eighth-graders chose answer choice a, that is 1;

28 percent of eighth-graders chose answer choice b, that is 19;

27 percent of eighth-graders chose answer choice c, that is 21;

14 percent of eighth-graders chose answer choice d, that is "I don't know";

while

24 percent of eighth-graders chose answer choice e, that is 2 (the best
estimate of the sum).

I wrote an email to Richard Rusczyk about Professor Wu's document, and he
later commented to me that if only 24 percent of eighth graders in the United
States can find the best answer for that question from that list of choices,
that's suggestive that 76 percent of American young people have no hope of
having any career that demands mathematical competency.

Some countries set much higher standards of mathematics competency for young
learners. My wife is from one, Taiwan, and I know various first-generation
immigrants to the United States from other countries where primary mathematics
instruction is much better than in the United States. Chapter 1:
"International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study
of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit
1.1 (pages 34 and 35)

<http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the
United States is above the international average score among the countries
surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the
United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which
is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level
for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the
United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. That is
despite the fact that most students in Singapore in my generation attended
school in a foreign language (English, which was not a language they spoke at
home) so that there is no more than one generation in Singapore that can even
be relied on to carry on a conversation at home in the sole language of school
instruction there.

The United States is making some painfully slow gains, as the article reports,
but it has a long way to go to provide "world-class" education to all pupils,
even though my local school district is one of many that claims to be
providing "world class" education.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
beware selection effects.

~~~
tokenadult
_beware selection effects_

Please explain. (Citations to sources you like would be kind to onlookers.)

------
wisty
Wow, you get slight gains in tests when you start forcing teachers to "teach
to the test".

It's like managing programmers by rewarding high LOC / day. There's pros and
cons to this approach. The pro is you control the system, and don't just let
brain-dead practices remain. For example, you sack the programmers who don't
actually program, or encourage the teachers who don't actually teach to lift
their game. Welcome back to the 1920s.

The con is that people start gaming the system.

It's like putting a patient in an iron lung. It keeps them above a certain
minimum level, but it's also a sign that things were well and truly screwed
before hand.

------
mikefox
One thing most people never get with this topic is the enormous variation
between groups, whether regional, socio-economic, ethno-cultural, etc. Fareed
Zakaria has said something to the effect that America could be cleanly split
into two nations, where the children of one perform at or better than the
level of European and even some East Asian nations, whereas the children of
the other perform abysmally, on par with the poorest of the developing world.
In America, aggregate measurements are meaningless.

~~~
tokenadult
I think Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson do a better job of showing their work
any time they write than Fareed Zakaria, and they point out that the top
students in the United States are laggards by international standards, because
they are underchallenged by the meager United States curriculum.

<http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/>

I can verify that statement because I have seen mathematics curriculum
materials from other countries. (I read Chinese, and own dozens of Chinese-
language mathematics textbooks from China and Taiwan, and I have found English
translations of textbooks from several other countries in academic libraries
in my town.) Doing thorough research on this subject, not the kind of research
that a weekly magazine columnist or blogger does, but THOROUGH research, puts
the lie to the idea that it is mainly demographic characteristics of the
United States population that put the United States so far behind the top-
performing countries. Review just how stark the differences in performance
levels are,

<http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

and then check the work of researchers who are analyzing where the problem
really is in the United States.

There is a problem of a bottom-performing group in the United States, but it
is a problem of a bottom-performing group of teachers who are unable to teach
primary school subjects. Encouraging the bottom 5 percent of teachers in the
United States year on year to find new occupations would help enormously,

[http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...](http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/Hanushek%202009%20CNTP%20ch%208.pdf)

but meanwhile some people are showing the courage and research orientation to
identify ways to help the learners in the United States who need the most help
to learn more mathematics and other subjects.

<http://www.teachingasleadership.org/>

