Here come the sums

Opinion: Whether or not you believe we have a problem with maths attainment in New Zealand depends on who you’re talking to, but as a maths educator teaching at a tertiary level in New Zealand for the past seven years, I’d say we certainly do.

I’ve seen a significant decline in students’ preparedness for university-level mathematics in that time and my more experienced colleagues tell me that this issue has persisted for at least the past 20 years. I’d be surprised if experienced educators from the primary and secondary sector hadn’t noticed the same decline.

Our current system isn’t working, and in particular, it is failing our most vulnerable students, including Māori and Pasifika students as well as those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The disparity in maths attainment among these groups is stark, and the consequences profound. Education should be the great equaliser, yet our current approach is entrenching inequality.

Every student deserves the opportunity to succeed, and it’s our responsibility to ensure that they are equipped with the skills to do so. While international test data may show that New Zealand is not the worst-performing country in the OECD (we’re actually a little above average) this is no comfort; many OECD countries are likewise reporting declines in maths attainment but being “better than bad” isn’t something to be proud of. Our goal should be to make sure that our students all have the skills that they will need in their lives. And to achieve that we need to benchmark performance against a fixed skill level. And if we don’t meet benchmarks, we need to accept that (unpalatable as it may be) and do something about it.

This issue transcends different governments and political cycles, making it pointless to argue over which government implemented what changes and when and who’s to blame. We need to move beyond political blame and focus on solutions, and urgently. If we were merely trying to enhance an already good performance, a cautious approach might be justified, but this is a crisis we can’t afford. We need to change the way we teach, how our students learn – and urgently.

We don’t yet know the details of the current Government’s plan, so it would be hasty to pass judgment before we see them. I suspect that, whatever changes are made, the curriculum will be similar to that developed by previous government, just rolled out a year early. Given the timeframe the Government has set, I don’t think it’s likely they are planning to start again from scratch. We’re more likely to see changes in focus on how maths is taught.

Reading between the lines, the Government is very supportive of what’s called ‘explicit teaching’ where the teacher directly instructs the students on how to solve a problem (for instance how to find a solution to a linear equation). The other side of this educational coin is ‘inquiry-based learning’, in which students are encouraged to investigate problems and find their own solutions.

The Government’s support of explicit teaching has raised alarm in some education research circles, with concerns that it will all be ‘teacher-led’ with teachers telling students what to do, then making them learn everything by rote. However I would describe this method another way: the teacher provides students with well-developed techniques that have been refined (usually over centuries) to effectively solve a problem, then ask them to practise what they’ve learned.

The teacher’s instruction acts as a scaffolding while students build their own fluency with the theory. I would argue that we’ve often expected too much of students when we asked them to come up with their own ways of solving a problem, they simply don’t have the knowledge to re-develop centuries of theory.

Education theory always does tend to be polarising, but what usually happens in the classroom is a manifestation of a mix of theories. So a teacher might explicitly teach students to solve a linear equation and give them an inquiry-based task about how they might apply that knowledge in the real world.

Like many in the education sector I’m keen for details on the resources that will be going into schools, plans around the small-group interventions to support students who have fallen behind, and how teachers will be supported to achieve these changes within the Government’s schedule.

If there is one thing (of many) the Government could learn from past mistakes, is to be open to learning from and adjusting to new ways of teaching and learning maths. There are many theories about what will or won’t work, but it’s hard to obtain conclusive data on effectiveness.

I’m glad to see that further assessments of the curriculum have been included in this plan; we should always be monitoring any approach that we take, assessing our progress and adjusting accordingly.

This problem has developed over many years and solving it will take some time. I can only hope that whatever this and successive governments will learn, is that they need to keep working on it.