Commentary
Canadian students are struggling academically. Math scores on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) declined by 35 points from 2003 to 2022, the most recent year of available test data. According to PISA, 20 points is the approximate equivalent of one grade level. Thus, Canadian students are nearly two grade levels behind in their math skills than where they were 20 years ago despite more money being spent on K-12 education across the country. This is unacceptable.
Poor math skills are a problem for many reasons. Students who are weak in math will find their employment opportunities increasingly limited since more and more careers, from car mechanic to electrician, require solid math skills.
Unfortunately, an educational philosophy known as “discovery learning,” which de-emphasizes direct instruction and encourages students to invent their own ways of doing math, heavily influences schools across Canada. Advocates of this approach often discourage timed math tests, claiming they harm students and lead to math anxiety. If this were true, then it would be unfair to subject students to this kind of pressure.
However, a new report titled “What the Science of Learning Teaches Us About Arithmetic Fluency” notes that there’s no evidence to support these claims. In fact, moderate levels of stress and anxiety often lead to knowledge and skills becoming more securely lodged in our long-term memories. Conversely, avoiding anxiety-inducing situations merely amplifies anxiety over time since students won’t gain practical experience dealing with anxiety in appropriate ways.
The report’s authors apply important principles, from developmental cognitive science to math instruction. They conclude that memorization and practise are essential to the development of foundational math skills.
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While discovery learning encourages students to invent their own ways of solving math problems, the authors emphasize the importance of explicit instruction by teachers. Simply put, students benefit when teachers clearly explain new concepts, show students how to solve problems, and give students plenty of opportunity to practise.
According to these researchers, deliberate well-structured practise is particularly important. This includes much more than simply having students recite the same handful of facts. Rather, students must learn how to retrieve key facts from their long-term memories and apply them to various situations. Thus, they develop automaticity in their math skills along with a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts. This leads to students becoming more proficient in math.
It should come as little surprise that the report’s authors also recommend that teachers receive better training in developmental cognitive science during their teacher preparation programs. If teachers had this training, they would better understand the importance of practise and memorization in math instruction.
If these points remind you of the longstanding phonics versus whole language debate about reading instruction, they should. Like what we see in math education, one side argues that students learn best by learning how to sound out individual letters (phonics) while the other (whole language) promotes guessing the meaning of words based on various context clues.
As far as the research is concerned, the debate about reading instruction was settled decades ago: phonics is superior hands down. This is why phonics is often called the “science of reading.” Yet schools across the country remain heavily influenced by whole language philosophy. Three years ago, the Ontario Human Rights Commission conducted an exhaustive investigation that found that Ontario students were being shortchanged by teachers using whole language methods when they should have been using phonics.
Now we find ourselves in a similar predicament to how math is taught in schools. Even though the evidence overwhelmingly supports explicit instruction, memorization of math facts, timed tests, and plenty of practise, discovery learning continues to influence the way students are taught math.
It shouldn’t take another 20 years of declining math scores before things change. As with reading, it’s time we start using evidence-based approaches to math instruction in every classroom.
Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
