That'd be right

Concrete examples don't help students learn math, study finds

For some time I have been meaning to complain about the way maths is taught these days at primary level, and the story above gives me a good excuse to do it now.

While I can't be the only parent to doubt the value of the methods now used in early maths teaching, I have particular reason to be irritated with it.

That's because my son has a clear developmental language delay. His general IQ is fine, but it would seem that the way his brain processes and remember language is just not quite what it should be, so that (for example) at age 7 he still needs a lot of correction with the tense of very common verbs, and must receive directions in short, clear sentences.

The problem is, as his teachers acknowledge, the way maths is taught now is very verbal, and a language development delay can therefore cause a much stronger "knock on" delay with maths than in the past. You didn't need much language to memorise tables, or to learn the one set method of how to do simple maths operations. You do need solid language when the maths questions and exercises are all framed in something akin to "real life" examples, or when they don't show just one way of doing a simple mathematical exercise, but 3 or 4 ways of thinking about it and letting the child work out the way that best suits them.

Parents with kids in primary school will know what I mean.

Michelle Malkin had a post late last year about some particularly silly sounding American maths texts. Maybe ours are not as bad as that, but the video she has in that post does illustrate the "multi-method" approach that is taken here, even from Grade 2. The video link is here.

Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to the link above, in which some researchers argue that the overuse of "real life examples" for teaching maths may not in fact help kids learn the basic concept behind the example. That sounds counter-intuitive, but they have experiment to back them up.

So, great, here we have a hint of what might be a coming maths education equivalent to the "whole word / phonetics" debate of the last decade or two. Maybe in 10 year's time there will be a lot less "real life" examples or problems for primary school kids, and more straight forward maths as per the 1960's.

In the meantime, my son will have been somewhat disadvantaged by current educational fads.

The irritating thing is that older class room teachers can recognise fads in education, but can nonetheless be pretty helpless in being able to counter them.