CHE: "The Divider" (math education)

[Wahoo Redux]

Just wondering what the mathematicians (or anyone) would think about this profile of Stanford math-education innovator and provocateur Jo Boaler.  It's a bit lengthy but very well written and an interesting profile of a contradictory character.

CHE: Meet the Stanford Professor at the Center of the Knock-Down, Drag-Out Math Wars 

[Liquidambar]

Is there a non-paywalled version?  I'd be interested to read it.

[Wahoo Redux]

If you give them your email (I used gmail) so CHE can annoy you with their newsletter, ads for their special issues, and the news feed you should be able to read anything on their site for free.

[fizzycist]

I read it a couple days ago.

Boaler comes across as someone who thinks they got learning all figured out. The rest of us chumps who struggle and think hard about learning are inclined to call BS.

I've never met an academic who was passionate about reducing their work to practice who didn't exaggerate and play fast and loose with the literature. Nothing really special about this case. I can't stand an overconfident pitch about a fundamentally uncertain topic, but i bet there is some misogyny in how she gets challenged.

I thought the article was pretty fair on presenting the state of CA math wars.

Overall the article is a good read, at least for a relative novice to the topic like me.

[apl68]

So what is the debate over?  Methods of math instruction?  Diversity and inclusion in math?

[marshwiggle]

I read it a couple days ago.

Boaler comes across as someone who thinks they got learning all figured out. The rest of us chumps who struggle and think hard about learning are inclined to call BS.

I've never met an academic who was passionate about reducing their work to practice who didn't exaggerate and play fast and loose with the literature. Nothing really special about this case. I can't stand an overconfident pitch about a fundamentally uncertain topic, but i bet there is some misogyny in how she gets challenged.

That's quite possibly true, although she doesn't help herself by claiming that rather than addressing the actual issues that are raised.

But the desire of educational policy makers to treat every new policy as The Second Coming is well-known (and frustrating, since it's often based on pretty sketchy "research").

[marshwiggle]

So what is the debate over?  Methods of math instruction?  Diversity and inclusion in math?

The article is really sketchy on details, but ti seems to be that her focus is on lots of group work, with students of all ability levels, and she claims it reduces math anxiety and makes weaker students do better at math. Her critics (reading between the lines) suggest that the better students are being held back by it. (Anyone who knows more feel free to correct me.) If improving the performance of the bottom 30% (arbitrarily chosen number) is at the expense of the top 10% (arbitrarily chosen number), is that an improvement or not?
Again, if that's kind of what's going on, there is lots of history of using good students to essentially tutor weak students, which may benefit the system, but may not be best for the good students.

[dismalist]

I googled around a bit and found a document explicating California's math framework, based in part on her work. https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

I read the FAQ's.

Incomprehensible bureaubabble. There is one comprehensible thing, though. The so-called "rush to calculus" is criticized

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) issued a joint statement that included the premise: "Although calculus can play an important role in secondary school, the ultimate goal of the K–12 mathematics curriculum should not be to get students into and through a course in calculus by twelfth grade but to have established the mathematical foundation that will enable students to pursue whatever course of study interests them when they get to college."

I infer that bright students will indeed be slowed down.

[mleok]

As a mathematician, I have not generally been impressed by the methodology employed by professors of mathematics education.

[marshwiggle]

As a mathematician, I have not generally been impressed by the methodology employed by professors of mathematics education.

It has always bugged me that dislike of math has been accepted (or even lionized) whereas something such as dislike of *essays (which is quite common in techies) is dismissed as something people just have to get over. (It probably has to do with the fact that most of the people who write, such as journalists, are by definition people who probably think essays are cool and math is gross.)

As someone who's spent a career running labs for majors and non-majors, I have no problem working with people who are only taking this because they have to, and I can tailor labs for them, but the goals for those are very different from the goals for the majors who have to know this stuff and are prepared to learn it.

One-size-fits-all is a bad way to do education, for everyone.


*and subjective grading. Don't even get me started on that one....

[apl68]

So what is the debate over?  Methods of math instruction?  Diversity and inclusion in math?

The article is really sketchy on details, but ti seems to be that her focus is on lots of group work, with students of all ability levels, and she claims it reduces math anxiety and makes weaker students do better at math. Her critics (reading between the lines) suggest that the better students are being held back by it. (Anyone who knows more feel free to correct me.) If improving the performance of the bottom 30% (arbitrarily chosen number) is at the expense of the top 10% (arbitrarily chosen number), is that an improvement or not?
Again, if that's kind of what's going on, there is lots of history of using good students to essentially tutor weak students, which may benefit the system, but may not be best for the good students.

If it works, though--an awfully big if--then it might have the effect of reducing math illiteracy among the weaker students.  Which would be very desirable for society in all sorts of ways, and in the long run might go some way toward addressing that "math is gross" stigma you complain about in another post on the thread.

I'm kind of interested in this issue, since I know little about math pedagogy.  I know that in some societies most educated people reportedly grow up with strong math skills.  But I also know that these societies tend not to have particularly sophisticated pedagogy--they owe their high levels of student achievement to a powerful tradition of brute-force rote learning and a cultural expectation that one simply has to suck it up and do what one must.  Are there methods of learning math that genuinely have been shown to produce better outcomes, or is math achievement pretty much all a matter of motivation and persistence, which are both strongly lacking in most of our students?

[ciao_yall]

So what is the debate over?  Methods of math instruction?  Diversity and inclusion in math?

The article is really sketchy on details, but ti seems to be that her focus is on lots of group work, with students of all ability levels, and she claims it reduces math anxiety and makes weaker students do better at math. Her critics (reading between the lines) suggest that the better students are being held back by it. (Anyone who knows more feel free to correct me.) If improving the performance of the bottom 30% (arbitrarily chosen number) is at the expense of the top 10% (arbitrarily chosen number), is that an improvement or not?
Again, if that's kind of what's going on, there is lots of history of using good students to essentially tutor weak students, which may benefit the system, but may not be best for the good students.

Actually, tutoring weaker students helps the stronger students by making them learn the material more deeply in order to explain it to others, and in different ways.

It's not a zero-sum game.

[marshwiggle]

So what is the debate over?  Methods of math instruction?  Diversity and inclusion in math?

The article is really sketchy on details, but ti seems to be that her focus is on lots of group work, with students of all ability levels, and she claims it reduces math anxiety and makes weaker students do better at math. Her critics (reading between the lines) suggest that the better students are being held back by it. (Anyone who knows more feel free to correct me.) If improving the performance of the bottom 30% (arbitrarily chosen number) is at the expense of the top 10% (arbitrarily chosen number), is that an improvement or not?
Again, if that's kind of what's going on, there is lots of history of using good students to essentially tutor weak students, which may benefit the system, but may not be best for the good students.

Actually, tutoring weaker students helps the stronger students by making them learn the material more deeply in order to explain it to others, and in different ways.

It's not a zero-sum game.

But it's not the same as them learning more material. And the incremental benefit of learning that more deeply will decrease rapidly the longer they stay on one specific topic.
The fact that the class will do better if it gets a bunch of (unpaid) tutors added  is no big surprise. But if parents don't get to choose how much of their kids' time is spent as (unpaid) tutors rather than learning more themselves, they're entitled to be unimpressed.

[Parasaurolophus]

So what is the debate over?  Methods of math instruction?  Diversity and inclusion in math?

The article is really sketchy on details, but ti seems to be that her focus is on lots of group work, with students of all ability levels, and she claims it reduces math anxiety and makes weaker students do better at math. Her critics (reading between the lines) suggest that the better students are being held back by it. (Anyone who knows more feel free to correct me.) If improving the performance of the bottom 30% (arbitrarily chosen number) is at the expense of the top 10% (arbitrarily chosen number), is that an improvement or not?
Again, if that's kind of what's going on, there is lots of history of using good students to essentially tutor weak students, which may benefit the system, but may not be best for the good students.

Actually, tutoring weaker students helps the stronger students by making them learn the material more deeply in order to explain it to others, and in different ways.

It's not a zero-sum game.

That's been my anecdotal experience teaching formal logic. The strong students develop more fluency and facility with the material, which makes them better able to apply it to novel problems.

So yeah, marshwiggle, they don't learn more brute content. But there's a limit to how much new content they will get in any class, and they'll get there by the end of the course. If there was no cap to how much they'd get, then sure, it's be holding the ones who get it back somewhat. But that's not the case.

But it also benefits the students who aren't getting it to have them explain it to me/one another (with supervision). It helps them to identify and understand where their gaps are, and it is easier to fix the problem that way. If they don't understand where they're struggling, it just seems impossible to them.

[mleok]

So what is the debate over?  Methods of math instruction?  Diversity and inclusion in math?

The article is really sketchy on details, but ti seems to be that her focus is on lots of group work, with students of all ability levels, and she claims it reduces math anxiety and makes weaker students do better at math. Her critics (reading between the lines) suggest that the better students are being held back by it. (Anyone who knows more feel free to correct me.) If improving the performance of the bottom 30% (arbitrarily chosen number) is at the expense of the top 10% (arbitrarily chosen number), is that an improvement or not?
Again, if that's kind of what's going on, there is lots of history of using good students to essentially tutor weak students, which may benefit the system, but may not be best for the good students.

If it works, though--an awfully big if--then it might have the effect of reducing math illiteracy among the weaker students.  Which would be very desirable for society in all sorts of ways, and in the long run might go some way toward addressing that "math is gross" stigma you complain about in another post on the thread.

I'm kind of interested in this issue, since I know little about math pedagogy.  I know that in some societies most educated people reportedly grow up with strong math skills.  But I also know that these societies tend not to have particularly sophisticated pedagogy--they owe their high levels of student achievement to a powerful tradition of brute-force rote learning and a cultural expectation that one simply has to suck it up and do what one must.  Are there methods of learning math that genuinely have been shown to produce better outcomes, or is math achievement pretty much all a matter of motivation and persistence, which are both strongly lacking in most of our students?

As a person who was educated in Singapore, a big part of the quality of K-12 education in mathematics there is that there is a set rigid sequence of mathematics courses, and there are never gaps in which a student is not taking mathematics of some sorts, so it is possible to build up mathematical skills in a scaffolded fashion. In addition, as a society, we did not accept the premise that some students were "bad" at mathematics, only that they did not apply themselves sufficiently. In contrast, I literally have distinguished colleagues in chemistry who think that requiring all undergraduates to take calculus is cruel and unusual.