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posted by Snow on Wednesday November 30 2016, @05:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the early-burnout dept.

The results from the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) were released on 29 November and, in general, the results are largely the same as in prior years: namely that a group of East Asian countries (Taiwan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan) were far ahead of the rest of the world, particularly in math, on both tests administered (4th and 8th grade).

One difference: for the first time this year, the TIMSS also tracked the progress of the same set of students by giving them a third test in their last year of school. The test, called TIMSS Advanced, was given in the nine countries that agreed to participate. These results found that the scores across the three tests from the students who were taking the most challenging math and science classes in their senior year progressively got worse over time. For instance, US students who scored 29 points above the midpoint on science as 4th graders scored 13 points above as 8th graders, and ended up 63 points below midpoint in their senior year. This trend was generally the same in the other countries except for an elite group of Russian students who take an extra class of math a day, and Slovenian students who bucked the trend in science but not math.

This article from sciencemag.org notes:

The advanced students also struggled to meet the international benchmark for the tests. In math, only 2% of the 32,000 students scored at an “advanced” level, and only 43% demonstrated even a “basic knowledge” of algebra, calculus, and geometry. The results were similar in physics: Only 5% of the 24,000 students were advanced, and a total of 46% showed a basic understanding of the subject. That means more than half the students tested weren’t really performing at an advanced level.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 30 2016, @05:40PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @05:40PM (#435016) Journal

    Note I say the following as someone who has actually taught high school math and physics for a few years back in the early 2000s.

    The western system is superior in that it takes a hell of a long time and effort to actually learn math

    Huh? I don't think a system is "superior" merely because it takes more time and effort.

    and pragmatically in society it seems to work better to produce kids who only understand, deeply understand, perhaps just the concept of addition

    I'd sort of agree with you somewhat if we actually DID that, but I haven't seen evidence that the "western system" actually teaches math at that sort of "deep" level to most students.

    ather than squirting out drones that can be replaced by a $5 calculator who have memorized that 6 (random content free operator here no idea what it means) 7 equals 42, which isn't very useful to memorize if it can be replaced by a $5 calculator and you have no idea what "random content free operator" actually means or does or why you'd ever use it in the real world.

    I absolutely agree that students need to understand what an operation is and what it can be used for in a practical sense, rather than memorizing some stuff blindly without understanding the purpose of anything you're doing. HOWEVER, I have also had the experience of teaching Algebra II in a lower-middle-class school in an economically depressed town, where I had loads of students enrolled in Algebra II who couldn't do basic multiplication without a calculator. Some of them struggled with basic addition and subtraction facts.

    Here's the issue: have you ever tried to teach someone to do algebra when they can't figure out what 13 minus 8 is without a calculator? I have. The problem is if you don't have ANY basic arithmetic facts memorized, it makes it impossible for students to even follow simple example problems in class that you're trying to use to demonstrate the "deeper" ideas you're talking about. Does everyone need to pause for 15 seconds at each step of solving an equation so we all can figure out what 13 minus 8 or 6x7 is with our calculators?

    Practically speaking, that makes teaching advanced math very difficult. At some point you need to be able to rely on SOME knowledge in the students' heads so you can go through the basic mechanics of algebra at a reasonable pace. And I'm not talking about training mental math wizards here, who can multiply two three-digit numbers in their heads. I'm talking about having SOME facility with basic arithmetic facts that can allow you to go through basic demonstrations of how higher-level math works.

    I do agree once you move beyond the basics -- for example, regardless of calculators, I'd much rather we spent a greater time teaching things like estimation and orders of magnitude and realizing when a final answer is "reasonable" than on detailed algorithms for long division or whatever. Too many times I had students make an input error on a calculator and get an outlandish answer, but they just wrote down what the calculator spit out without any clue that it made no sense. That sort of estimation ALSO tends to take at least a BASIC facility with arithmetic -- rounding off numbers and knowing roughly the order of magnitude that will result when when you multiply or whatever.

    I don't think there's any purpose in the modern world of stack ranking kids based on how well they LARP as a mathematica-emulator, when the world is full of problems that need to be solved by people who actually understand math, and the two skill areas are pretty much orthogonal to each other.

    I absolutely agree that we probably spend way too much time drilling algorithms rather than doing applications. But I also think, as with basic arithmetic facts, that it's important for students to have an understanding of the underlying algorithms at some BASIC level, or else they won't be able to catch errors, realize when they may have inputted something wrong because the "solution" doesn't make sense, etc. I've seen WAY too many examples in the "real world" of people who don't understand the underlying math of software packages they're using and make huge errors because of it. This is perhaps most prevalent in applications of statistical packages, where you see so many studies done where the researchers seem to have no clue how the stats actually work -- they just shove the data into a stats package, and it spits out some correlations under some test (that they don't know the assumptions of, because they don't understand the underlying math), and they just publish it as if it were meaningful.

    We do history the same way. I'm old enough that we stack ranked history student kids based on how well we memorized unrelated dates. Your value as a history student is memorizing the correct order of the following events, the end of the edo period in Japan vs the protestant reformation. Who Fing cares.

    As someone who has also had occasion to teach history within some subject areas, I absolutely agree that memorizing detailed dates is a bit of a waste, especially early on. On the other hand, it IS often important historically to have some idea of the relative ordering of events, roughly what kinds of things were contemporaneous, etc. In the quest to eliminate date memorization in history, I've seen way too many students who had no clue what CENTURY critical historical events transpired in. It's difficult to have productive discussion about the causes of a war or political trends when you think something relevant to those causes/trends happened at time X, but it actually happened 200 years earlier or later.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 30 2016, @06:20PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 30 2016, @06:20PM (#435039)

    Mostly we seem to be looking at the same thing from different angles.

    The bit about more time and effort to learn is more an emphasis on the costs of learning, that being the time and effort. In my attempt at contracting with the Asian approach of pattern match something you've memorized and perform the memorized action, although it doesn't mean anything to the kid.

    From a high end down it sure would be nice to have 13-8 cached in memory for instant access, but they likely needed a calculator because they didn't understand addition not for speed. But you can't really learn algebra anyway unless you know subtraction which that kid probably didn't know...

    We seem to agree WRT the stats anecdote.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 30 2016, @07:01PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @07:01PM (#435059) Journal

      Yes, I don't think we disagree on many points -- but I wanted to add some further nuance. My main quibble at the beginning was with the idea that "western" systems do better than East Asia in teaching a "deeper"understanding. I don't think that's true for most students. Instead, I think what's happened in the U.S. is that we've started to give up more on rote memorization and drilling algorithms, etc. with the INTENT to replace it with "deeper" thought -- but that second part is rarely implemented well (if at all).

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 30 2016, @10:01PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 30 2016, @10:01PM (#435146)

        but that second part is rarely implemented well

        Oh they try. I remember watching my kids learn arithmetic years ago long before Algebra and they did all kinds of stuff with analogies and counting objects to really pound home the concept of addition.

        Now for fun I had signed up my kids for Kumon between sports seasons and in addition to being the only white people in the building the Kumon way of math was here's todays worksheet fill it out as fast as possible repeat. Now if my kids problem was not being able to do mental math as fast as his old man, this probably would have been quite useful. But I was hoping for something else. Ironically I learned to extremely well as a kid by simply doing a lot of reading (like I think I read the entire original Tom Swift collection (like the triphibian atomicar and repelatron not the much newer ship to the mars series) the summer of Kindergarten before 1st grade, one book per day) and Kumon excels at that although my daughter didn't like it.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday November 30 2016, @07:37PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 30 2016, @07:37PM (#435076) Journal

    Well, FWIW, I was pretty bad at arithmetic, and disliked it though not intensely. OTOH, I taught myself Algebra and was pretty good (not REALLY good, but pretty good) at math once we got out of arithmetic. E.g., I was the only person in class who could factor quadratic equations in my head and just write down the answer to the class problems. 1 out of 30 isn't great, but it's pretty good. And I still consider myself poor at arithmetic. But I did eventually learn it. And if I hadn't learned it I couldn't have done Algebra.

    I don't know what a good answer it, but if you want to handle math, you need to learn arithmetic. Set theory just doesn't cut it. (And teaching set theory in second grade was a mistake. One that fortunately I was past before they instituted it.) I got my geometry from a simplified Euclid's approach, and I've always pitied my younger sister who got the garbage they replaced him with. Strangely she stopped taking math classes immediately after that abortion of a course.

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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:46AM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:46AM (#435249)

    I'm talking about having SOME facility with basic arithmetic facts that can allow you to go through basic demonstrations of how higher-level math works.

    Forget higher-level math -- I'd say that being unable to do 2- to 3-digit addition and subtraction in your head means that "You get paid next week, but you see a pair of shoes and some cool sunglasses you want to buy. Based on the tag prices, do you have enough in your checking account for your debit card to cover these, or will you have to wait until you get paid? You've got about 15 minutes to catch the bus, the line is kind of long, and your phone is dead." is going to be out of reach.

    Note I didn't say 'credit card'. I suspect that the lack of on-tap arithmetic skills interacts with the bottomless pit of a credit card to cause at least some of the current consumer credit crisis.