The way you talk to your child about math matters

Parents’ responses to children’s math success, failure linked to motivation, anxiety

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA

“You’re so smart!”

This encouraging response may actually do more harm than good to children’s math performance, according to a new study by the University of Georgia.

Co-conducted by Michael Barger, an assistant professor in the Mary Frances Early College of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, the study found that encouraging children with responses related to their personal traits or innate abilities may dampen their math motivation and achievement over time.

Parents who make comments linking their children’s performance to personal attributes like intelligence (e.g., “You’re so smart” or “Math just isn’t your thing”) are using what’s referred to as person responses. In contrast, parents who link their children’s actions, such as effort or strategy use, to their performance (e.g., “You worked hard” or “What might be useful next time you have a math test?”) are using process responses.

“Person-focused praise sounds good on its face, but ultimately, it might undermine students’ motivation if they run into challenges,” said Barger. “Because if you run into challenges after being told you’re so smart, you might think, ‘Maybe they were wrong.’ We also know that people tend to think about math as something that some people can do and others can’t, and that language is pretty common, whether it’s among parents or teachers, even with young kids.”

Praising strategy and effort

For the study, researchers asked more than 500 parents to report on how they respond to their children’s math performance and their math beliefs and goals. Students were assessed in two waves across a year to measure their math motivation and achievement.

The results showed that parents who viewed math ability as changeable were more likely to give process responses focused on their children’s strategy use and efforts rather than their intelligence or other personal attributes.

In contrast, parents who believe math ability is unchangeable and that math failure can’t be constructive gave more person-oriented responses. Parents with high expectations for their children gave a combination of both responses.

While responses highlighting strategy and effort were not related to any achievement outcomes, children who received more responses about their personal traits—in particular, related to failure—were more likely to avoid harder math problems, exhibited higher levels of math anxiety, and scored lower on a math achievement test.

“There are a couple possible reasons process messages aren’t necessarily improving math achievement,” said Barger. “It could be that they’re just so frequent now that they just kind of wash over, and that doesn’t have as much of an impact. And it could also be that some of these messages don’t land correctly if they’re not authentic. However, with person responses, we saw clear links to anxiety and less preference for challenging math problems.”

A boost to math motivation

Because person responses predict poor math adjustment in children over time, researchers recommend limiting this type of response at home and in the classroom.

“There’s not necessarily any benefit to talking about whether people are or are not math people because if you’re a student who starts struggling, you’re going to start thinking that maybe you’re not a math person,” said Barger.

The second recommendation for parents is to think about their own beliefs and goals for their kids and examine how these might lead them to respond in person or process ways. Simply telling parents to refrain from talking about math ability may not be enough.

Instead, convincing parents that math performance can improve could go a long way.

Many parents praise their children’s individual characteristics as a form of encouragement, but focusing less on how students perform and more on their strategy and enjoyment of math might be a more effective way to enhance motivation.

This means using responses like “Why do you think that happened?” or “Did you have fun?” in place of responses like “You’re so smart” or “Math just isn’t your thing.”

“We should also be asking whether parents believe that math ability can change and if they view failure as an opportunity to learn, as this seems to be related to less person responses,” said Barger. “This is more effective than just giving a checklist of things to say.”

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JOURNAL

Child Development

DOI

10.1111/cdev.13834 

ARTICLE TITLE

Parents' responses to children's math performance in early elementary school: Links with parents' math beliefs and children's math adjustment

DONALD DUCK IN MATHMAGIC LAND

Two Native Scholars Link Native Culture to Math

Yahoo News
Native Education

Danny Luecke (enrolled member of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), developer/instructor for the bachelor’s degree in Secondary Math Education at Turtle Mountain Community College. Luecke is currently completing his Ph.D. in math and math education at North Dakota State University. (Photo/American Indian College Fund)

BY NATIVE NEWS ONLINE STAFF AUGUST 12, 2023

The focus of tribal colleges’ work is to seek connections between the cultures and heritage of the Indigenous communities they serve and mainstream education curricula.

Danny Luecke (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), a member of the Teacher Education Department at Turtle Mountain Community College, and Dr. David Sanders (Oglala Sioux Tribe), vice president of research at the American Indian College Fund, explored the connections between math content, local culture, and the classroom.

While using an Indigenous research paradigm at Sitting Bull College, located on the Standing Rock Reservation, their work looks at how to connect language and culture in the tribal college math classroom and has contributed to a change in the theory of knowledge incorporated at tribal colleges and universities.

Their resulting co-authored, peer-reviewed research paper titled “Dakota/Lakota Match Connections: an epistemological framework for teaching and learning mathematics with Indigenous communities and students,” was published in Frontiers in Education on July 27, 2023.

“My main thought was how to connect the TCU math classroom with language and culture. Most of us were taught math with the Western value of separation/abstraction (that is removing relationship) as the only and superior way to think mathematically. The myth that Western math is placeless, without culture, and contains all mathematical knowing is very prevalent, but does not align with the SBC mission statement that has D/Lakota language, culture, and values influencing every classroom, including the math class," Luecke said of his research and work at Sitting Bull College as a math teacher partnering with its immersion school,

Through conversations at Sitting Bull College with elders, language instructors, math instructors, and people in the community, Luecke said he found many examples of the connections between the Dakota/Lakota language and math. \

The research methodology Luecke and Sanders used incorporated the voices of community members, elders, Native speakers, and culture bearers. Around the same time, Luecke said he was doing work personally to learn what it means to be a member of the Choctaw Nation.

Luecke is the developer/instructor for the bachelor’s degree in Secondary Math Education at Turtle Mountain Community College. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in math and math education at North Dakota State University. His research focuses on Dakota/Lakota Math Connections at Sitting Bull College. He was born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota. In addition to his membership in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Luecke has ancestry from multiple European nations as well. He says he is honoring all his ancestors and the Creator through his life and work with the Standing Rock and Turtle Mountain communities. He has also written other articles about Indigenous math connections, including the forthcoming article "Dakota/Lakota Math Connections: Results from Developing a Community-based Math Resource" submitted for publication in 2024 in the Tribal College and University Research Journal, and “Ojibwe Math at Turtle Mountain Community College,” to be published in the Fall 2023 issue of Tribal College Journal. His forthcoming dissertation (December 2023) is titled “Dakota/Lakota Math Connections: Applying an Indigenous Research Paradigm to Research in Undergraduate Math Education.”

“Danny has taken up an important strand of practical research, applying an Indigenous methodological approach which requires Indigenous communities to be involved throughout the process. In Danny's work, community members have shaped, developed, and drive the connections between Western Mathematics, English, Dakota/Lakota Mathematics and the Dakota/Lakota languages while not privileging one over the other. Stemming from this work is the idea that mathematics can increase Dakota/Lakota language fluency and Dakota/Lakota languages can help increase mathematical conceptual understanding. In essence, the intersection of these four areas helps to demystify the subject of mathematics, with the understanding that all cultures use mathematics," Sanders said, 

Cheryl Crazy Bull, President and CEO of the American Indian College Fund says making making cultural connections with teaching students leads to meaningful education for Native students.

“Naming our traditional knowledge and linking that knowledge with teaching and learning in our schools and homes is one of the ways that we ensure quality, meaningful education for our children. When scholars make those connections for us, we honor and appreciate that scholarship and the opportunity to share it with the broader educational community," Crazy Bull said.

START WITH PYTHOGARAS & EUCLID

Disconnected from math, students call for real-world relevance in RAND’s first-ever youth survey

In research funded by the Gates Foundation, new national data show widespread disengagement in math, highlighting a need for more relatable instruction and higher-quality curriculum

RAND Corporation

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According to the first-ever survey fielded to RAND’s new American Youth Panel (AYP), 49% of students in middle and high school grades reported losing interest in math about half or more of the time, and 75% of youths reported losing interest for at least some class time.

 

Loss of interest in math is consistent across genders and racial and ethnic groups.

 

In the fall of 2024, RAND asked youths in grades 5 through 12 about their math class experiences with plans to measure these math attitudes annually to track trends over time. This nationally representative report was fielded to a group of almost 2,000 youth ages 12-21 who regularly complete surveys via email and text message about their attitudes, behaviors, school experiences, and other issues affecting their lives.

 

Thirty percent of middle and high school students said that they have never considered themselves a “math person.” Those who did identify as math people developed this view during elementary school, suggesting that elementary school math teachers have a large role in cultivating positive math attitudes.

 

“Student feedback offers one of many likely reasons for the slow post-pandemic recovery: students are frequently bored with math,” said Heather L. Schwartz, vice president and director of RAND Education and Labor. “Although boredom is not unique to math, routine boredom is a problem. These findings emphasize the importance of boosting student engagement to improve academic outcomes.”

 

The RAND survey also found that students who lose interest in math often want fewer online activities and more real-world applications in their math classes.

 

“It may sound surprising in today’s high-tech environment, but online math activities might be less motivating than face-to-face instruction,” said Robert Bozick, senior research scientist at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. “This emphasizes the need for high-quality math instruction, and we suggest a mix of engaging math activities combining face-to-face teacher-student interactions with a mix of offline and online activities and the use of more real-world applications in the classroom.”

 

This work was supported by the Gates Foundation

 

The AYP was launched in 2024 to augment RAND’s American Life Panel (ALP). Developed by RAND researchers in 2006, the ALP is a probability sample–based panel of approximately 8,000 regularly interviewed adults in the United States ages 18 and older. The AYP was developed to extend the age range of the ALP so that it can collect timely data on issues related to contemporary youths and their transition to adulthood.

 

Other authors of Losing Interest In Math: Findings from the American Youth Panel are Melissa Kay Diliberti and Sarah Ohls.

 

RAND Education and Labor conducts research on early childhood through postsecondary education programs, workforce development, and programs and policies affecting workers, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and decisionmaking.

 

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...AND THE SOLUTION IS

LEGO improves maths and spatial ability in the classroom

University of Surrey

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A simple classroom activity involving a classic childhood staple, LEGO, could improve children’s maths and spatial ability, leading researchers to demand for policymakers to shake up the school curricula and teachers’ professional development. 

A new study, led by the University of Surrey, tested incorporating LEGO building into the daily teaching curriculum, leading to tangible improvements and boosting abilities for students aged six to seven.  

The study, which involved 409 children from schools in Surrey and Portsmouth, demonstrated that the six-week Spatial Cognition to Enhance mathematical learning (SPACE) programme - where teachers led LEGO-based activities - resulted in marked improvements in children's mental rotation skills (the ability to visualise and manipulate objects in their minds) and mathematics performance. 

Professor Emily Farran, Professor in Cognitive Development at the University of Surrey and lead author of the study, said: 

"We've known for some time that spatial reasoning and maths are closely linked, however, most spatial training has been conducted in laboratory settings. Our study shows that spatial training delivered by teachers in the classroom is effective, with positive outcomes for their students." 

The SPACE programme involved training teachers on the importance of spatial reasoning and, via a booklet with visual instructions, how to guide their students through structured LEGO building exercises. Teachers were encouraged to prompt students to think spatially, for example, to visualise and mentally manipulate the blocks, fostering their spatial skills. 

Professor Camilla Gilmore, Professor of Mathematical Cognition at Loughborough University and co-author of the study commented: 

"Addressing underachievement and reducing disadvantage gaps in mathematics is an ongoing challenge for educators and policy makers. The results of this study were clear - children who participated in the SPACE programme showed significant improvements in their spatial and maths abilities compared to those who received standard instruction. This suggests that simple, hands-on spatial activities can have a powerful impact on learning and are an important avenue to improve children’s achievement and enjoyment of mathematics.  

Professor Farran added: 

"This research highlights the importance of spatial reasoning in mathematics education. By incorporating spatial activities into the curriculum, we will equip the next generation to meet the heightened demands for critical thinking, problem solving and data-use brought about by technological and AI-enabled change." 

Spatial interventions such as SPACE have also been shown to support inclusion, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). In fact, children from disadvantaged backgrounds often show larger gains in mathematics competence compared with their peers, suggesting that opportunities to think and work spatially could contribute to closing attainment gaps. 

[ENDS] 

• Professor Emily Farran is available for interview, please contact mediarelations@surrey.ac.uk to arrange.   

• The full paper is available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mbe.70006

• An image of Professor Farran is available upon request. 

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Journal

Mind Brain and Education

DOI

10.1111/mbe.70006 

Article Title

Teacher delivered block construction training improves children’s mathematics performance.

Article Publication Date

17-Jun-2025

Big data tells story of diversity, migration of math's elite

Analysis of nearly 250,000 mathematicians gives a picture of the world of math

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE MIGRATION OF ELITE MATHEMATICIANS BETWEEN FIVE KEY COUNTRIES SINCE 1800. THE FLOW CHART REVEALS MASS FLOWS OF RESEARCHERS DUE TO HISTORICAL EVENTS, SUCH AS WAR. view more 

CREDIT: FIGURE BY HERBERT CHANG.

Math's top prize, the Fields Medal, has succeeded in making mathematics more inclusive but still rewards elitism, according to a Dartmouth study.

Published in Nature's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the study analyzed the effectiveness of the Fields Medal to make math at its highest level more representative across nations and identities. The result provides a visual, data-driven history of international migration and social networks among math elites, particularly since World War II.

"With so much recent discussion on equality in academia, we came to this study recognizing that math has a reputation of being egalitarian," says Herbert Chang, a research affiliate in Dartmouth's Fu Lab and lead author of the paper. "Our results provide a complex and rich story about the world of math especially since the establishment of the Fields Medal."

The Fields Medal, widely considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, is awarded every four years to mathematicians under the age of 40. It was first presented in 1936 to honor young mathematicians from groups that were typically underrepresented in top math circles.

According to the Dartmouth mathematicians, the prize has received criticism over its history for rewarding existing power structures rather than making math more inclusive and equitable at the elite level. Against this criticism, the study set out to explore how well the award has lived up to its original promise.

The analysis shows that the Fields Medal has elevated mathematicians of marginalized nationalities, but that the there is also "self-reinforcing behavior," mostly through mentoring relationships among math elites.

As example, the study found that the award succeeded in integrating mathematicians from Japan and Germany after WWII. But it also found that two-thirds of 60 medalists emerged from the same math "ancestral tree."

Although the study found diversity among award winners from top math countries, it also found that groups with Arabic, African, and East Asian language identities remain under-represented at the elite level.

The research team defines "elite" as a connection between Fields medalists, rather than other indicators that measure academic productivity and impact.

"It's a privilege for a young mathematician to inherit a powerful network of relationships from an influential academic advisor," says Feng Fu, an assistant professor of mathematics and the senior researcher for the study. "The growing number of doctoral degrees awarded to international mathematicians in the U.S. indicates that mathematics can be a powerful integrative force in our common humanity."

According to the paper, only France exports more elite mathematicians to the United States than it receives from the U.S. "This seems to affirm France as the intellectual capital of mathematics," say the authors.

"A mathematician that is French and attends a top 50 institution means they are 6.4 times more likely to gain membership into the elite circle," the research team says in the study. "On the other hand, being East Asian and attending a top 50 institution only affords you 1.5 times the likelihood of gaining membership into this elite circle."

Among other findings of the study:

- All Fields medalists can be traced to nine "academic family trees"; the largest holds 44 out of 60 medalists.

- Germany has consistently high levels of pluralism in mathematics except for the period of WWII.

- Japan has recently opened to higher levels of non-Japanese elites within the country.

- The number of Russian elite mathematicians decreased significantly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The research team used artificial intelligence techniques to study data on more than 240,000 mathematicians dating as far back as the 16th century. The information was taken from the Mathematics Genealogy database maintained by North Dakota State University.

Researchers organized elite mathematicians by countries and lingo-ethnic categories and then mapped their flow between nations and across ethnic lines. Connections were drawn to show the physical movement, identity and academic relationship of mathematicians.

"There are many sources of inequality in elite-level math and academia. Our goal was to characterize how a single factor--mentorship--plays a role, while telling a comprehensive story about mathematics," says Chang, who was in Dartmouth's Jack Byrne Scholars Program in Math and Society as an undergraduate.

Prior studies of the Fields Medal and elitism in math have focused on how mathematicians cite research. According to the research team, such an approach might miss the structural forces that prevent access to individuals from outside elite math circles.

The research advances past studies by providing a high-level view of the relationship between mentorship, prize giving, and ethnicity.

The research team concludes, as other researchers have in the past, that the Fields Medal should "return to its roots" in order to achieve its original goal of elevating marginalized voices.

###

The research was supported by the Shapiro Visitors Program in the Department of Mathematics and the Neukom Institute.

 

Peers crucial in shaping boys’ confidence in math skills

UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH

Boys are good at math, girls not so much? A study from the University of Zurich has analyzed the social mechanisms that contribute to the gender gap in math confidence. While peer comparisons seem to play a crucial role for boys, girls’ subjective evaluations are more likely to be based on objective performance.

Research has shown that in Western societies, the average secondary school girl has less confidence in her mathematical abilities than the average boy of the same age. At the same time, no significant difference has been found between girls’ and boys’ performance in mathematics. This phenomenon is often framed as girls not being confident enough in their abilities, or that boys might in fact be overconfident.

This math confidence gap has far-reaching consequences: self-perceived competence influences educational and occupational choices and young people choose university subjects and careers that they believe they are talented in. As a result, women are underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects at university level and in high-paying STEM careers.

Peer processes provide nuanced insights into varying self-perceptions

A study from the University of Zurich (UZH) focuses on a previously neglected aspect of the math confidence gap: the role of peer relationships. “Especially in adolescence, peers are the primary social reference for individual development. Peer processes that operate through friendship networks determine a wide range of individual outcomes,” said the study’s lead author Isabel Raabe from the Department of Sociology at UZH. The study analyzed data from 8,812 individuals in 358 classrooms in a longitudinal social network analysis.

As expected, the main predictor of math confidence is individual math grades. While girls translated their grades – more or less directly – into self-assessment, boys with below-average grades nevertheless believed they were good at math.

Boys tend to be overconfident and sensitive to social processes

“In general, boys seem to be more sensitive to social processes in their self-perception – they compare themselves more with others for validation and then adjust their confidence accordingly,” Raabe explains. “When they were confronted with girls’ self-assessments in cross-gender friendships, their math confidence tended to be lower.” Peers’ self-assessment was less relevant to girls’ math confidence. Their subjective evaluation seemed to be driven more by objective performance.

Gender stereotypes did not appear to have negative social consequences for either boys or girls. “We found that confidence in mathematics is often associated with better social integration, both in same-sex and cross-sex friendships,” said Raabe. Thus, there was no evidence of harmful peer norms pressuring girls to underestimate their math skills.

The results of the study suggest that math skills are more important to boys, who adjust their self-assessment in peer processes, while math confidence does not seem to be socially relevant for girls.

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JOURNAL

European Societies

DOI

10.1080/14616696.2024.2349217 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The gendered maths confidence gap, social influence, and social integration

U$A
Two Decades of Progress, Nearly Gone: National Math, Reading Scores Hit Historic Lows

By Sarah D. Sparks — October 24, 2022 

Illustration by Gina Tomko/Education Week and iStock/Getty

The pandemic has smacked American students back to the last century in math and reading achievement, according to the tests known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Results for students who took the test in spring 2022—the first main National Assessment of Educational Progress administration for these grades since the pandemic began—show the biggest drop in math performance in 4th and 8th grades since the testing program began in 1990. In reading, 4th and 8th graders likewise are performing on par with students in the 1990s, and about a third of students in both grades can’t read at even the “basic” achievement level—the lowest level on the test.

Academic declines on NAEP were sweeping, spanning low-income and wealthier students, boys and girls, and most racial or ethnic groups in both subjects and grades.

That made for some achievement gaps changing in unusual ways. For example, from 2019 to 2022, reading performance fell significantly for white 8th graders, but not their Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American classmates, leading to smaller racial differences in performance. In 4th grade, Black, Hispanic, white, and Native American students’ average reading scores fell in 2022, while Asian students’ average scores improved, widening the white-Asian performance gap from 7 points in 2019 to 12 points in 2022.

“This is not just nerdy education policy stuff. This is really about the future of young people. The world we’re moving towards is one that requires significantly higher skills to be successful, to live lives of purpose and meaning,” said Jeb Bush, former Florida governor and founder of the education advocacy group Chiefs for Change, in a briefing before the NAEP results were released. “If we allow these learning gaps to grow, and if we allow for the decline in learning to just stand pat ... a lot of dreams are gonna be shattered over the long haul.”

RELATED STORIES

Explaining That Steep Drop in Math Scores on NAEP: 5 Takeaways
5 Things to Know About the Slide in Reading Achievement on NAEP
A Closer Look at NAEP Declines: What a Leading Ed. Researcher Finds Surprising (Opinion)

The results come on the heels of NAEP’s long-term trend data released last month, which also showed historically poor performance for 9-year-olds.

Eighth graders saw the steepest drops in both subjects, and high schools will have to significantly ramp up academic support for the students who entered high school this fall, said Beverly Perdue, a former governor of North Carolina and chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the testing program

“Otherwise,” she said, “students will graduate and enter college and the workforce without the skills and knowledge we need to be globally competitive.”

Graduation rates fell in at least 31 states for the class of 2021, and the latest graduating class of 2022 had historically low scores on college placement tests.

In math, pool of struggling learners grows

The average NAEP math score fell 5 points in 4th grade, to 236 out of 500, and in 8th grade fell 8 points, to 274 out of 500. In prior years, the top-performing 10 percent of math students held their ground, while the lowest-achieving students fell. This time, however, math achievement fell across every percentile, even for the highest performers.

“Normally, for a NAEP assessment at the national level, we’re talking about significant differences of 2 and 3 points. So an 8-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark; it is troubling; it is significant,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP.

In both grades 4 and 8, more students cannot meet even the basic level of math achievement, according to the NAEP report. The pool of advanced performers in math has likewise shrunk at both grades, though top readers have held steady.

Roberto Rodríguez, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy, noted that, in a prior NAEP study of districts’ practices during the pandemic, 75 percent of districts reported that they held remedial programs this summer, and more than half of districts in the study reported using intensive tutoring to help catch students up.


RELATED


MATHEMATICS Explaining That Steep Drop in Math Scores on NAEP: 5 Takeaways
Sarah D. Sparks, October 24, 2022

“Kids need more time,” said Patricia Levesque the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd), in a briefing before the NAEP results were released. “They lost time over the last several years, of getting instruction that they need in math, and we need to figure out ways to give them more time.”

Levesque pointed to states like Tennessee, which is requiring high-dosage tutoring for students performing below grade level. However, with large swaths of students now far behind, paying for intensive tutoring may be hard to sustain after federal pandemic recovery funding runs out.

And it’s not clear teachers feel ready to take on the severity of students’ learning loss.

More than a third of 4th graders and 21 percent of 8th graders who participated in NAEP had a teacher who reported spending nearly every day on remedial material in math. But less than half of students in either grade had teachers who were confident in their ability to address knowledge and skill gaps in math.

“We’ve known for decades that many teachers, especially in high-poverty areas, are not as mathematically confident,” said Zalman Usiskin, a professor emeritus and director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project. “They tend to focus more on memorization and the most basic of basic skills, not on problem-solving. ... and the prediction has to be that it’s going to get worse, because teachers now are trying to catch up students who are behind because of pandemic-related disruptions.”

Reading drops are smaller but hit low-achievers hard

Nationwide, the average reading score on NAEP fell 3 points from 2019 to 2022, to 217 in grade 4 and 260 in grade 8. While not as large a drop as math, it represented a significant decline in reading skills for both grades for all but the top 10 percent of 4th graders.

While experts have urged schools to accelerate students’ learning in order to help them make up lost academic ground, more than half of 8th graders had teachers who reported using remedial measures at least once or twice a week, and 20 percent had teachers who did so nearly every day. Among 4th graders, 70 percent of teachers reported using remedial measures a couple times a week. Moreover, about 1 in 3 students who took NAEP in 2022 had a teacher who reported covering the previous year’s material and using remedial instruction every day or nearly every da

When it comes to acceleration, “it just seems as if we expect teachers to know how to do that,” said Kymyona Burk, the policy director for early literacy at ExcelinEd, and a former literacy director for the state of Mississippi. “We have to invest in people, we have to invest in their knowledge.”

In both grades 4 and 8, larger numbers of students cannot read at even the basic academic level than was the case in 2019, according to the 2022 NAEP report. Top readers have held steady, but gained little ground.

Burk said states need to bolster the use of science-based reading instruction to help students who started school during the pandemic and may struggle more with foundational reading skills.


RELATED


READING & LITERACY WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS5 Things to Know About the Slide in Reading Achievement on NAEP
Sarah D. Sparks, October 24, 2022

Looking ahead, there are some signs of recovery in reading at least. One study by the testing group Amplify looked at more than 300,000 K-3 students in 43 states who took the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, assessment, this fall—which would be the most recent, available testing data. That study found that while students in all grades remain below their pre-pandemic reading achievement, the share of students who started school this fall on track to read on grade level by the end of the academic year ticked up in every grade, ranging from 33 percent of kindergarteners to 55 percent of 3rd graders.

“The news may be still a bit grim, although the positive side is that, directionally, we are seeing that students at the beginning of this year are more prepared for school than they were at the beginning of last year,” said Paul Gazzero, the director of data analysis for Amplify.

SEE ALSO

READING & LITERACYPROJECT Why Putting the 'Science of Reading' Into Practice Is So Challenging
Sarah Schwartz, July 20, 2022


Still, the Amplify study suggests large shares of students—ranging from half of kindergartners to 30 percent of 3rd graders—won’t read on grade level by the end of this school year without significant, intensive interventions.
Political fallout?

Well before NAEP results were made public, some education pundits predicted students in states that reopened their schools earlier in the pandemic would have better scores than students in states with longer pandemic-related spans of virtual schooling. Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, suggested that differences in the performance between states that reopened school buildings for in-person learning earlier in the pandemic could become fodder in midterm elections.

But Carr, the NCES commissioner, strongly disagreed with interpreting the results in that way.

“There’s nothing in this data that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and student achievement,” Carr said. “And let’s not forget that remote learning looked very different all across the United States. ... We have massive comprehensive decline everywhere, whether some were in remote learning longer or shorter than others.”

By the start of 2020-21, the first full school year of the pandemic, an Education Week analysis found that several states had mandated full-time, in-person learning, (Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North and South Carolinas, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia) but nearly three-quarters of the 100 largest school districts (representing 9 million students) opened that fall only with virtual instruction.
In reading, 8th graders lost ground in all but two of those states; Iowa and Texas had flat scores, but so did several late-opening states like California, New York, and New Jersey. Performance was more mixed at 4th grade, with seven early-opening states and at least one late-opening one, California, seeing no change in reading achievement during the pandemic.

The other six early-opening states saw drops in 4th grade reading in 2022. In math, only South Carolina and Iowa among the early-opening states held steady in 4th grade. The rest saw drops in math achievement from 2019 to 2022. And Utah, the only state that saw no decline in 8th grade math, had no mandate on schools reopening at the start of 2020-21.

MULTIMEDIA GRAPHS

Sarah D. Sparks
Assistant Editor, Education Week
Sarah D. Sparks covers education research, data, and the science of learning for Education Week.

 

Study in India shows kids use different math skills at work vs. school

Students can excel at mental math in marketplace jobs but struggle with formal math in the classroom, and vice versa

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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In India, many kids who work in retail markets have good math skills: They can quickly perform a range of calculations to complete transactions. But as a new study shows, these kids often perform much worse on the same kinds of problems as they are taught in the classroom. This happens even though many of these students still attend school or attended school through 7th or 8th grades.

Conversely, the study also finds, Indian students who are still enrolled in school and don’t have jobs do better on school-type math problems, but they often fare poorly at the kinds of problems that occur in marketplaces.

Overall, both the “market kids” and the “school kids” struggle with the approach the other group is proficient in, raising questions about how to help both groups learn math more comprehensively. 

“For the school kids, they do worse when you go from an abstract problem to a concrete problem,” says MIT economist Esther Duflo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “For the market kids, it’s the opposite.”

Indeed, the kids with jobs who are also in school “underperform despite being extraordinarily good at mental math,” says Abhijit Banerjee an MIT economist and another co-author of the paper. “That for me was always the revelation, that the one doesn’t translate into the other.”

The paper, “Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math,” will be published in Nature. The authors are Banerjee, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Swati Bhattacharjee of the newspaper Ananda Bazar Patrika, in Kolkata, India; Raghabendra Chattopadhyay of the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata; Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT; Alejandro J. Ganimian, a professor of applied psychology and economics at New York University; Kailash Rajaha, a doctoral candidate in economics at MIT; and Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Duflo and Banerjee shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 and are co-founders of MIT’s Jameel Abdul Lateef Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a global leader in development economics.

Three experiments

The study consists largely of three data-collection exercises with some embedded experiments. The first one shows that 201 kids working in markets in Kolkata do have good math skills. For instance, a researcher, posing as an ordinary shopper, would ask for the cost of 800 grams of potatoes sold at 20 rupees per kilogram, then ask for the cost of 1.4 kilograms of onions sold at 15 rupees per kilo. They would request the combined answer — 37 rupees —  then hand the market worker a 200 rupee note and collect 163 rupees back. All told, the kids working in markets correctly solved this kind of problem from 95 to 98 percent of the time by the second try.  

However, when the working children were pulled aside (with their parents’ permission) and given a standardized Indian national math test, just 32 percent could correctly divide a three-digit number by a one-digit number, and just 54 percent could correctly subtract a two-digit number from another two-digit number two times. Clearly, the kids’ skills were not yielding classroom results. 

The researchers then conducted a second study with 400 kids working in markets in Delhi, which replicated the results: Working kids had a strong ability to handle market transactions, but only about 15 percent of the ones also in school were at average proficiency in math.

In the second study, the researchers also asked the reverse question: How do students doing well in school fare at market math problems? Here, with 200 students from 17 Delhi schools who do not work in markets, they found that 96 percent of the students could solve typical problems with a pencil, paper, unlimited time, and one opportunity to self-correct. But when the students had to solve the problems in a make-believe “market” setting, that figure dropped to just 60 percent. The students had unlimited time and access to paper and pencil, so that figure may actually overestimate how they would fare in a market.

Finally, in a third study, conducted in Delhi with over 200 kids, the researchers compared the performances of both “market” and “school” kids again on numerous math problems in varying conditions. While 85 percent of the working kids got the right answer to a market transaction problem, only 10 percent of nonworking kids correctly answered a question of similar difficulty, when faced with limited time and with no aids like pencil and paper. However, given the same division and subtraction problems, but with pencil and paper, 59 percent of nonmarket kids got them right, compared to 45 percent of market kids. 

To further evaluate market kids and school kids on a level playing field, the researchers then presented each group with a word problem about a boy going to the market and buying two vegetables. Roughly one-third of the market kids were able to solve this without any aid, while fewer than 1 percent of the school kids did.

Why might the performance of the nonworking students decline when given a problem in market conditions?

“They learned an algorithm but didn’t understand it,” Banerjee says. 

Meanwhile, the market kids seemed to use certain tactics to handle retail transactions. For one thing, they appear to use rounding well. Take a problem like 43 times 11. To handle that intuitively, you might multiply 43 times 10, and then add 43, for the final answer of 473. This appears to be what they are doing.

“The market kids are able to exploit base 10, so they do better on base 10 problems,” Duflo says. “The school kids have no idea. It makes no difference to them. The market kids may have additional tricks of this sort that we did not see.” On the other hand, the school kids had a better grasp of formal written methods of divison, subtraction, and more. 

Going farther in school

The findings raise a significant point about students skills and academic progress. While it is a good thing that the kids with market jobs are proficient at generating rapid answers, it would likely be better for the long-term futures if they also did well in school and wound up with a high school degree or better. Finding a way to cross the divide between informal and formal ways of tackling math problems, then, could notably help some Indian children. 

The fact that such a divide exists, meanwhile, suggests some new approaches could be tried in the classroom. 

Banerjee, for one, suspects that part of the issue is a classroom process making it seem as if there is only one true route to funding an arithmetic answer. Instead, he believes, following the work of co-author Spelke, that helping students reason their way to an approximation of the right answer can help them truly get a handle on what is needed to solve these types of problems. 

Even so, Duflo adds, “We don’t want to blame the teachers. It’s not their fault. They are given a strict curriculum to follow, and strict methods to follow.” 

That still leaves open the question of what to change, in concrete classroom terms. That topic, it happens, is something the research group is in the process of weighing, as they consider new experiments that might address it directly. The current finding, however, make clear progress would be useful. 

“These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal mathematics,” the authors state in the paper. 

Support for the research was provided in part by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s Post-Primary Education Initiative, the Foundation Blaise Pascal, and the AXA Research Fund. 

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Written by Peter Dizikes, MIT News

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08502-w 

Article Title

"Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math"