Popular Perceptions of Mathematics Instruction
By: David Bressoud @dbressoud
David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. davidbressoud.org
One of the lessons learned when trying to revise the high school curriculum to offer students more options was that if this is sold as providing opportunities for under-privileged students, it is a non-starter. This is especially true if access to accelerated programs might become limited. Parental concerns about losing access to these programs was a major factor in newly elected Virginia Governor Youngkin’s 2022 decision to end the Virginia Math Pathways Initiative that was gearing up to offer options in Data, Modeling, and Computing in addition to the traditional “Analysis” option that prepares students for calculus.
Seeking to understand how parents and teachers feel about the current state of math education, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored a large-scale study, conducted by the Global Strategy Group and designed to help them prepare to focus their K-12 strategy on mathematics. The slide deck summarizing the findings of this study, The Need to Make Math More Relevant and Engaging for K-12 Students, what I will be describing here, can be found at https://usprogram.gatesfoundation.org/-/media/files/gates-analysis-deck-f040723-website.pdf.
They did find that selling these changes as updating the curriculum to make mathematics more useful and appealing was seen positively. Mathematics topped the charts as the academic subject that is most important, rated “extremely important” by 60% of respondents, just pipping English/Language Arts at 59%. There was general agreement by both parents and teachers that success in mathematics prepares students for success later in life.
There also was agreement that mathematics instruction is the subject most in need of updating and improvement. It was the only subject for which a majority of parents and teachers felt it needed updating: 54% of White parents, 57% of Black parents, 62% of Latino parents, and 60% of math teachers.
Given a choice of ways in which mathematics might be improved, the two clear favorites were “Making math education more real-world applicable” and “Teaching more practical life skills in math class.” Asked what ideal math education should be, the top choices were “Relevant to the real world (64%),” “Useful (54%),” “Focused on creative problem solving (52%)”, and “Engaging (50%).” “Focusing on process and following steps” and “Focused on the basics” were much lower, 39% and 37% respectively. Disappointingly, “Challenging and rigorous” and “Joyful” came in at only 24% each (Figure 1).
There was solid support among both parents and teachers for the notion that high school math classes should be relevant to what students will be doing after graduation (Figures 2 and 3). Given the choice:
“Making math more relevant and relatable for students of all backgrounds will make them more interested in what they are learning and therefore more likely to do well in math. If students are able to connect to and see themselves in what they are learning in math class, they are more likely to succeed.”
versus
Figure 1.
“There is a place for instruction that incorporates diverse backgrounds and experiences in other school classes, but at its core, math is about numbers. Efforts to bring culture into math classrooms will distract from teaching the fundamentals and making sure students can pass exams.”
parents preferred the first 69% to 31%, teachers the first by 76% to 24%.
What does this mean? In short there is a lot of sympathy for updating the curriculum to include statistics, data analysis, and quantitative reasoning. However, there are still many obstacles to making this happen. We need to prepare more teachers who are well-equipped to teach mathematics with these emphases. We need to convince parents that providing resources to build programs in these areas will not limit access to traditional accelerated preparation for calculus. And most importantly, we must guarantee that programs in statistics, data analysis, quantitative reasoning, or other non-traditional paths do not become dead ends, that the student who starts on one of these programs is not disadvantaged if they later decide to pursue a college major that requires calculus.
That is a tall order. But what is encouraging in this report is that it is possible to gather public support to accomplish it.
Figure 2.
Figure 3