Long-time readers will recall that AAMT and AMSI and others teamed up for the memorable statement, Why Maths Must Change. Given the genesis of that statement and the events following its release, one might imagine that AMSI would have learned to choose their friends more wisely. Apparently not. Continue reading “AAMT and AMSI Are Engaged”
I have come to realise the need to acknowledge a major error on this blog. Errors will occur, of course, but when they occur it is important to admit them and to own them, to make amends to the extent that is possible. Continue reading “Acknowledging and Apologising For an Error”
This post, as indicated by the title, is ostensibly about the State of declining enrolments in mathematics subjects. That State, as we shall see, turns out to be Queensland. But, first things first.
Last week, AMSI released its annual Mathematics Participation Report Card, complete with a media release and a media notice of an Australian story on the report (Murdoch, paywalled). Begun in 2008, AMSI’s report has become a tradition of sorts, kind of an Australian Groundhog Day. Each year, mathematicians poke out their heads, look at the darker maths ed skies, mutter “Bugger this, it’s worse”, and go back inside. This year is no different. Except, it turns out to be different. Continue reading “The State of Declining Mathematics Enrolments”
What a month. It’s raining mendacity.
Today, the ridiculous AMSI-AAMT-MERGA statement received further press coverage, this time in a report from education stenographer, Suzan Delibasic (paywalled, Murdoch):
“Leading experts are calling for a maths curriculum overhaul, with a major review set to focus on fixing declining academic results.”
Once the stage has been set with straight-faced paraphrasing of AMSI-AAMT-MERGA nonsense, Delbonis’s report consists of quotes from three of these “leading experts”, beginning with AAMT‘s CEO, Allan Dougan:
“The whole idea of a maths class where the teacher teaches the content and the students practise it 300 times, that’s what we’re moving away from.”
300 times? If a kid is assigned 30 exercises as practice, the school will call Child Services. 3 times is much closer to the current mark, particularly in primary school, where the real damage is being done.
We have no idea where Dougan dredged up his Dickensian dream, but of course it has nothing to do with reality. The reality is that decades of “leading experts” killing the teaching of technique, of denigrating proper practice is a huge part of why Australian mathematics education is currently a disaster. Dougan apparently imagines the cure is less practice than the trivial amounts that currently exist.
To illustrate the point, Dougan provides his own, striking example:
“[Dougan] said one problem-solving task could involve year 6 students taking part in an activity called It All Adds Up, where each letter of the alphabet is given a dollar value”
“Letter A is $1 to Z being $26. You can start asking students open questions such as finding a four-letter word that costs $50 —the success of this task is how they approach it and how they think about problem solving.”
Looks like a fun game. How about VOID? Or CLOT? Do I win?
Seriously, Year 6? As an add-on activity for Year 2, maybe Year 3, sure. But if you imagine it reasonable to expect Year 6 students to gain anything from such an addition game, then your sense of appropriate skill level bears no relation to reality. And even for Year 2 or Year 3 students, it’s a game, which by definition cannot be the main game. You learn addition by practising addition – the carefully structured 30 times thing – not by the occasional random sum in the middle of a game.
Our second Leading Expert is AMSI‘s Director, Tim Marchant:
“Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute director Professor Tim Marchant said he was concerned by the shortage of qualified maths teachers.”
“The data shows about 50 per cent of schools have maths classes taught by teachers that aren’t qualified in maths,”
Well, it wouldn’t be AMSI if they weren’t punching down, whining about unqualified teachers. But Professor Marchant also considers classroom activities:
Prof Marchant said group activities in the classroom helped learning and made maths “fun” … He suggested hands-on learning experiences including using Rubik’s cubes to help with problem solving.
Rubik’s cubes. Not enough games, not enough “fun”, that’s the problem.
Once upon a time, we had hope that AMSI would be a genuine force for improving Australian mathematics education. Now, we’d be happy if AMSI would just shut up, stop signing ridiculous statements and go away.
Our final Leading Expert is Peter Sullivan, Emeritus Professor of Education at Monash University:
“The revised curriculum needs to be simply written so teachers can understand and comprehend it; we want the big ideas clearly articulated,”
That’s Peter the Great there, the guy who led the writing of the current Australian mathematics curriculum.
Leading Experts. The “experts” part is debatable, but the “leading” is absolutely clear. These people are leading Australia to an even deeper level of educational Hell.
The revisions to Australia’s mathematics curriculum will be out soon, and it appears that the fix may be in. This fix will, of course, fix nothing; our guess is that things are about to get much worse.
As reported in yesterday’s SMH, Australia’s major league Maths Ed groups have released a “Joint Statement on Proposed Maths Curriculum”. Cosigned by AMSI, AAMT and MERGA, as well as AAS and ATSIMA, the statement is titled Why Maths [sic] Must Change. The statement is a triumph of modern educational ignorance.
The statement begins by noting “the proposed revisions to the Australian maths curriculum” are forthcoming, and “the importance of getting it right”. We are then told what “getting it right” means. The statement is poorly written and vague, inappropriately and inaccurately colloquial, but the message is clear enough:
“More than ever, our society needs students who are adaptable, resilient, responsive to challenges and able to handle unfamiliar situations. It is not enough to have knowledge – they must have the skills to take that knowledge and apply it to solve unknown problems, and do it quickly.”
Yes, the cure for our maths ed ills is yet more problem-solving, yet more overhyped exploration. And, this is to be contrasted with the alternative, a focus on “knowledge”. The writers are so proud of this ridiculous straw man that they repeat it:
We need education systems and curricula that help deliver students to society who are up for such a challenge – just having knowledge is no longer enough. Instead, the abilities to problem-solve, mathematise, hypothesise, model are all skills that add worth to acquired knowledge. Mathematics learning cannot sit in silos that focus on content and procedures. Instead, it must be something that gives the knowledge purpose.
We expect no better from AAMT or MERGA, but what about AMSI? Aren’t they like mathematicians, or something? Do AMSI’s glorious leaders really believe this nonsense? Do they really believe that school mathematics is, or was ever, a purposeless “silo” of knowledge-acquisition? Do they honestly think that the problem with Australia’s mathematics education, the reason, for example, why the majority of secondary students have no proper concept of or facility with fractions, is because there has been too much focus on content and procedure? Do they really imagine that these fraction-deficient students can nonetheless boldly venture forth to “solve unknown problems”?
The idea is, of course, absurd. The whole statement is absurd, a mission statement from the very same constructivist, discipline-hating, technique-hating ignorants who have been selling this snake oil for decades, and who are one of the major reasons why Australian mathematics education is now such a disaster. And, of course, their suggested cure for the problem they very much helped create is more of the same snake oil.
There is more in the statement. There is the predictable pointing to Australia’s woeful but irrelevant PISA scores, and the predictable silence on Australia’s woeful and highly relevant TIMSS scores. The writers express the hope, indeed the promise, that PISA results will improve. Which may well be true; it is the mathematics education, and the education generally, that will suffer.
We will remark upon one more, very troubling line from the statement:
As such, the suggested revisions in the curriculum are not just welcomed …
What, exactly, are these “suggested revisions”, and how do the cosigners of this statement know the revisions are “welcomed”? There are strong indications of what ACARA intends, and that what they intend will be awful. As far as we are aware, however, ACARA has yet to make any proposed revisions available for public comment.
What this implies, assuming that the above line is not simply more poor wording, is that the drafters, and perhaps the cosigners of the statement, are privy to ACARA’s inner workings, and that they are pleased with them. As we wrote, it appears that the fix is in.
Anything that will please the cosigners of the statement Why Maths Must Change will be a disaster for Australian mathematics education, and it seems as if the cosigners have reason to be pleased. God help the rest of us.
The PISA results were released on Tuesday, and Australians having been losing their minds over them. Which is admirably consistent: the country has worked so hard at losing minds over the last 20+ years, it seems entirely reasonable to keep on going.
We’ve never paid much attention to PISA. We’ve always had the sense that the tests were tainted in a NAPLANesque manner, and in any case we can’t imagine the results would ever indicate anything about Australian maths education that isn’t already blindingly obvious. As Bob Dylan (almost) sang, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
And so it is with PISA 2018. Australia’s mathematical decline is undeniable, astonishing and entirely predictable. Indeed, for the NAPLANesque reasons suggested above, the decline in mathematics standards is probably significantly greater than is suggested by PISA. Greg Ashman raises the issue in this post.
So, how did this happen, and what are we to do? Unsurprisingly, there has been no reluctance from our glorious educational leaders to proffer warnings and solutions. AMSI, of course, is worrying their bone, whining for about the thirtieth time about unqualified teachers. The Lord of ACER thinks that Australia is focusing too much on “the basics”, at the expense of “deep understandings”. If only the dear Lord’s understanding was a little deeper.
Others suggest we should “focus systematically on student and teacher wellbeing“, whatever that means. Or, we should reduce teachers’ “audit anxiety“. Or, the problem is “teachers [tend] to focus on content rather than student learning“. Or, the problem is a “behaviour crisis“. Or, we should have “increased scrutiny of university education degrees” and “support [students’] schooling at home”. And, we could introduce “master teachers”. But apparently “more testing is not the answer“. In any case, “The time for talk is over“, according to a speech by Minister Tehan.
Some of these suggestions are, of course, simply ludicrous. Others, and others we haven’t mentioned, have at least a kernel of truth, and a couple we can strongly endorse.
No institution we can see, however, no person we have read, seems ready to face up to the systemic corruption, to see the PISA results in the light of the fundamental perversion of mathematics education in Australia. Not a word we could see questioning the role of calculators and the fetishisation of their progeny. Not a note of doubt about the effect of computers. Not a single suggestion that STEM may not be an antidote but, rather, a poison. Barely a word on the “inquiry” swampland that most primary schools have become. And, barely a word on the loss of discipline, on the valuable and essential meanings of that word. What possible hope is there, then, for meaningful change?
We await PISA 2021 with unbated breath.
Last week, AMSI released yet another paper on the issue of school mathematics being taught by “out of discipline” teachers. It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that we have many issues with AMSI’s paper. Here, we’ll focus on just one aspect.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s report on AMSI’s paper begins:
Fewer than one in four Australian high school students have a qualified maths teacher …
That statement is, of course, utter nonsense. By any reasonable definition, a much higher percentage of secondary students are taught by formally “qualified” teachers. It is concerning that an “education reporter” would lead with such an implausible claim, but SMH was not alone. The news.com.au report was titled:
Only 1 in 4 high-schoolers are being taught maths by qualified teachers
The Australian’s barely comprehensible sentence, courtesy of another education reporter, appeared to suggest that matters are even worse:
Fewer than one in four students are taught by a qualified maths teacher — one with at least a university minor in the subject — at some stage between Years 7 to 10.
So, what is the source of all these inflated declarations of educational doom? It would appear to be on page 2 of AMSI’s paper. In the first of the paper’s eye-catching Key Points, the authors write:
The extent of the problem [with the supply of qualified teachers] is illustrated by the estimated amount of out‐of‐field teaching occurring with less than one in four students having a qualified mathematics teacher in each of Years 7 to 10.
That reminds us: we must buy AMSI a box of commas for Christmas.
The above sentence, which turned out to be the grabber of AMSI’s paper, is like an optical illusion: you think you’ve got the meaning, and then it slips around to mean something entirely different. It is no wonder if reporters misinterpreted.
What did the AMSI authors intend to convey, and on what basis? It is difficult to tell. A linked endnote in AMSI’s paper refers to a 2017 AMSI publication. The page reference to this second document is clearly incorrect, but it appears that the intention is to refer to page 4, which has its own list of key points, including:
At least 26% of Years 7–10 maths teachers are not fully qualified.
This is an admirably clear statement and, if true, one may (or may not) regard it as a relatively major problem. The statement, however, is not remotely supportive of the educational catastrophe that AMSI’s garbled 2019 statement led gullible reporters to declare.
Also puzzling, it is not clear how AMSI’s 2017 statement, or any other AMSI declaration that we could find, leads reasonably to any natural interpretation of AMSI’s 2019 statement. This is the case even if one ignores that “not fully qualified” does not clearly equate to “not qualified”, and that 26% of teachers does not equate to 26% of classes, nor to 26% of students. Even with the most liberal assumptions and generous interpretations, we still cannot determine the basis, any basis, for the 2019 statement. The reader is invited to give it a go.
There are plenty more serious issues with AMSI’s paper which, though raising some very important issues and suggestions, also connects some distant and very disputable dots. It probably doesn’t matter, however. We worked hard to read AMSI’s clumsily written paper. It seems unlikely that many others will do likewise.
The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute has just released its Report on Australian Year 12 students’ participation in mathematics from 2008 to 2017. The Report indicates, of course, that the percentage of girls doing a “higher level” maths subject is lower than the percentage of boys. (One headline trumpets that “Less girls are studying maths than boys”, proving only that fewer journalists are studying grammar.) More generally, the overall participation in higher level maths is reportedly the lowest for 20 years.
Gee.
Who would have thought that a boring and aimless curriculum, and lousy texts, and the crappy training of teachers by clowns who have in turn had crappy training, and the belittling of Mathematics by the S and the T and the E of STEM, and the faddish genuflection to technical gods, and decades of just plain dumbing down would have pissed off so many students?
AMSI’s Report of the bleeding obvious doesn’t consider the causes of the decline in participation. Fair enough. The Report is seriously flawed, however, in failing to note that the meaning of “higher level mathematics” is not a constant. The “higher level mathematics” of 2017 is significantly lower than that of 1997, which is lower again than that of 1977. The problem is much, much worse than AMSI’s Report suggests.
AMSI is not just reporting on the decline in participation, they are supposedly working to fix it. AMSI’s new director, Tim Brown, has been out and about, discussing the Report. Professor Brown is reported as saying that the reasons for the decline are “varied”, but of these varied reasons, he appears to have indicated just two to the media; first, “a shortage in qualified maths teachers”; second, “teaching from the textbook” rather than “active learning”.
Really? With all those plump targets, AMSI chooses these two? Yes, the lack of qualified teachers is a problem, and a problem AMSI apparently enjoys talking about. And yes, the current textbooks are appalling. But such low-fruit targets are not the substantive problem, and false fixes of second order issues will do little or nothing to improve matters. The real issue is one of systemic cultural decline.
We believe Professor Brown knows this. The question is, will Professor Brown drag AMSI, finally, into waging the genuine, important fights that need to be fought?