On Edspresso, Barry Garelick analyzes the National Math Panel’s report and likes what he sees, starting with the statement that, “[T]he system that translates mathematical knowledge into value and ability for the next generation - is broken and must be fixed.”
The report provides benchmarks for the critical foundations of algebra, setting out grade level expectations of mastery for fluency with whole numbers, fluency with fractions, and geometry and measurement. It also provides recommendations for the major topics of an algebra class.
It calls for teaching mastery the first time, not revisiting half-taught topics again and again.
. . . parents whose children have suffered through programs like Everyday Mathematics or Investigations in Number, Data and Space or other programs that grew out of grants from the Education and Human Resources Division of the National Science Foundation, know perfectly well what the following statement is about: “A focused, coherent progression of mathematics learning, with an emphasis on proficiency with key topics, should become the norm in elementary and middle school mathematics curricula. Any approach that continually revisits topics year after year without closure is to be avoided.”
One of the panelists, a math teacher, brought his eighth-grade algebra students to the panel’s final meeting. They “gathered, in rock fan fashion, around Hung-Hsi Wu — a panelist and math professor from Berkeley — to get his autograph and take pictures,” Garelick writes. Math groupies in America!
Update: Despite talk of a “truce” in the math wars, Education Gadfly’s Mike Petrilli calls the report “a major victory for math traditionalists with its advocacy for ‘procedural fluency’ and ‘automatic recall of facts,’ its concerns about an over-emphasis on teaching estimation and probability, and its caution that ‘to the degree that calculators impede the development of automacity, fluency in computation will be adversely affected’.”
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