It’s been a busy time, with VCE exams and lots of offline stuff, and we now have a few overdue posts. We’ll begin with an SMH report from a couple weeks ago, titled,
Why Australia’s maths crisis is at a tipping point and how we can fix it
The report, by SMH education editor, Lucy Carroll, appeared during NSW’s HSC exams and was framed around AMSI’s The State of Mathematical Sciences report. A Victoria-centred rewrite of Carroll’s report has just now appeared under the byline of education reporter, Alex Crowe, in SMH‘s sister paper, The Age, just in time for the Specialist Mathematics exams.
So what’s the crisis and why the tipping point? Carroll opens,
Top engineers and scientists say the nation’s mathematics crisis is at a tipping point, warning Australia’s ability to compete globally will be severely hindered without a dramatic lift in the number of teenagers studying the subject at a higher level.
OK, so not enough kids are doing the hard maths:
Enrolments in [NSW’s] HSC advanced maths have tumbled 17 per cent since 2004, physics is down 19 per cent and maths extension 1 has dropped 12 per cent.
The reader can check the national figures for herself, if she’s willing to shell out the $150 that AMSI is asking for the PDF, via the almost invisible link. Which all seems like a really great way to ensure that absolutely no one reads your report. But probably no one would read it anyway, so, whatever.
Back to the crisis and the tipping point. As Carroll notes, the decline in mathematics enrolments has been occurring for (at least) twenty years and, yes, it is reasonable to call it a crisis. But, after twenty years, this is hardly news. There may be a few penguins in the Australian Antarctic Territory who were still unaware but that’d be about it. In particular, AMSI is always banging on about the crisis, typically with all the trustworthiness of any other industry shill.
Still, we have a crisis. Which is almost certainly worse than reported since, along with declining enrolments in the hard subjects, the hardness of the subjects has also been declining. What about the tipping point? Let’s take a look:
Nothing is tipping. AMSI’s graph, which is not new, indicates there has been a steady and depressing decline over many years, and which may, or may not, have plateaued. There is possibly something hidden in those graphs, and we’re pondering, but there is nothing new here. People are simply making news because it is the season and because they can.
Still still, we have a crisis. So, what to do about it? Carroll, and then Crowe, quote many wise people, beginning with Jane MacMaster, former chief engineer at Engineers Australia:
“If we don’t address the maths problem now, and the deficit of qualified teachers, we will be less able to support our technology and data industries. …
We need that pool of advanced maths students to draw from for engineering and sciences. If we don’t boost numbers we will fall further behind and our economy will be less competitive.”
Gee, Jane. If only there were something you and your engineering mates could do to help.
On it went, with all manner of sciency people lamenting the lack of students taking higher mathematics, and almost all of it selling mathematics education as nothing more than training. As these types always do. Then AMSI’s Tim The Magician Marchant gets a shot, calling “for urgent action on the ‘crisis in maths enrolments’ and for a federal-state program to upskill teachers”; we are provided no indication of what this “urgent action” might be. Eddie Too Much Woo is there, of course, saying nothing of use, of course. Crowe also gives AAMT’s Allan WMMC Dougan a gig, who says his usual Dougany things. Crowe also notes, however, the university prerequisite thing, and she inserts an important point, that “dissatisfaction with how [mathematics] is taught” may be chasing kids away; alas, the cause of that dissatisfaction remains a mystery. And then there’s Greg:
Greg Ashman, maths researcher and deputy principal at Ballarat Clarendon College …
“Maths researcher”.
To be fair, it was Greg who alerted me to Carroll’s article, and to his “maths researcher” title, and apologised for not having caught it in the checking. Greg knows this stuff gets up my nose. In any case, Greg is given a very good run, with his brainy colleague John Sweller having a supporting role. And what does Greg Ashman, maths researcher, have to say? Well, Ashman also does the thing of selling mathematics as needed for technological professions, but he begins strongly on an entirely different note:
[Ashman] believes the slide in maths enrolments can be traced back to primary school.
“The single biggest thing we can do to encourage kids to do maths at higher levels is teach it really well from primary. From the ground up, from the first year. If we do that, students will learn the maths, see their success and become motivated.”
Basic operations, times tables and maths facts needed to be taught explicitly in primary school to build fluency, he said.
“When this happens, students gain confidence, see themselves as capable, and then will be more likely to take it in senior years.”
Yeah, it’s not rocket science, but Ashman is of course spot on. And notably the rocket scientists said nothing of the sort, or much of anything. Ashman ends on the same note, and stronger:
“We should also avoid selling maths apologetically, pleading its usefulness in everyday life. We don’t do that with other subjects. It’s not motivating, that comes from progress and success.”
He says at the start of year 7 students should have automatic recall of number facts such as number bonds, times tables up to 12×12, primes up to 100 and four operations with standard algorithms, including for long division.
It gets up my nose that Greg Ashman, maths researcher, is always the one who gets the nod for these reports, and that reporters don’t know what it means to be a mathematician. But it gets up my nose much more that Ashman is pretty much the only one ever quoted saying the obvious and essential things, that mathematicians, and more so the scientists and engineers, so much suck at this.
A colleague of mine wrote a book called “The lazy universe”. How does water run downhill? It takes the easiest road by avoiding things in the way such as rocks or logs. Perhaps in thinking about their futures, students think the same way.
Often. And, often, adults. What is your point?
Thanks for another great post, Marty. This is the first time I’ve had the balls to post my thoughts but you know how much impact you, Ashamn and others have had on my teaching.
I completely agree that scientists, engineers and academics should be giving maths education a bollocking and it’s frustrating that Ashman is often the only sensible voice to get quoted.
Whenever parents of my students, during parent-teacher interviews, have tried to reassure their child that they “need maths in the real world”, I have stopped them and said that actually, they probably won’t, but that doesn’t matter. I usually then say something like, we learn maths because it’s a part of our intellectual inheritance. Maths is one of the things that separates us from the other apes. We have an obligation to pass on this capacity to young people. I also say if we asses the value of a given set of knowledge or skills mandated for 10 or 12 or 14 year olds based on the extent to which it makes us future job-ready we might as well start streaming children from birth, denying all but a select few the privilege of learning history, or earth science or Shakespeare.
I have said similar things to colleagues who worry about making maths “contextual” and “relevant” and leaders who have commanded me to adopt “authentic-problem-based-learning” because “it works”.
Aaron,
My answer to the question “Why am I learning this?” goes as follows. In life there are many problems to solve. What will I have for dinner? Where will we go for a holiday? Should I get married? Should we have children? Where should we send the children to school? Should I pre-pay for my funeral? Some problems are trivial; other more complicated. At school one develops a wide range of problem-solving skills; we have a tool box equipped with ideas that we have learned in English, art, history, sport, science, cooking – and mathematics. By the time they leave school, students have a wide range of skills that can help them to think about how to solve the many problems that will confront them. Mathematical skills are in the tool box.
Hi, Aaron. Thanks for your kind words, and welcome to the comments.
There’s plenty of room to debate what mathematics (or any) education is “for”, even if we agree that the training thing and the “real world” thing are, to use your phrasing, bollocks. I prefer your “cultural heritage” take to Terry’s “problem solving skills” take, although in practice I’m not sure there need be much difference.
I wonder what kids do before they go to school and after school. My very unscientific impression that there is a variation in the life experience of mathematics, with some kids living quite a sterile existence indeed. There are lots of activities that kids could engage in — going to the store and making purchases, playing games of cards and board games, playing with geometric shapes, finding an address on a street or a page number in a book, watching the numerical information on the dashboard of a car, building things (especially those that involve geometric limitations), helping out in the kitchen or workshop, being read to that involve the use of numbers in ordering things, counting, measuring, addition and subtraction, proportionality and getting a bit of a feel for probability and geometrical properties such as symmetry and how things fit together. Such children may not only develop their own strategies for arithmetic operations but also get a sense of what the arithmetic operations actually connote. A lot of useful experience can be given in a competent early child care program, and I think that is where I would put a fair bit of my money.
One parent enrolling her grade 1 kid in a tutoring program complained that her kid could not add 3 and 5. How is that possible? Doesn’t the kid have any kind of life beyond being glued to a screen? I am not sure tutorial services actually help. I recently came across a book published for parents by a popular outfit that had pages and pages of repetitive low level drill exercises. Certainly there seems to be a feeling that if you get back to the olde tyme religion of drilling the hell out of them, then the all will be right in the world again. The sad thing is that there is lots of stuff at whatever level you want to catch the interest of children; you don’t have to mount a propaganda war about usefulness and improving their spiritual life. Ask them to find the first few multiples of 142857 and see how long it takes for the penny to drop, for example.
Thanks, Ed. You’ve made this point before, but it is worth making many times. The replacement of the physical with the digital in kids’ lives is a disaster for all sorts of reasons, but not least is the lack of development of intuition for and understanding of tangible objects, i.e. objects, individually and in number.
The schools and pre-schools have limited control over this. If the parents are stupid enough to give their 2YO an iPad then they will reap what they sow. But of course schools have some control and they almost always relinquish it. There is probably no instance of the use of computers in primary school where the job would not be better done without. The argument for secondary school is not far behind.
I teach students in a 7-10 school. Often I go to a class where at least 10% of students do not have a calculator even though they were on the booklist.
Should I suggest that we omit calculators from the booklist in 2025?
Depends whether or not you want all the other teachers to laugh at you.