For too many American kids, math isn’t adding up

Math scores in the US have been so bad for so long that teachers could be forgiven for trying anything to improve them. Unfortunately, many of the strategies they're using could be making things worse. It's a crisis decades in the making.

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In the early 20th century, education reformers including John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick developed a theory — drawing from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — that came to be known as constructivism. The idea was that learning happens best when students immerse themselves in a problem and find their own solution. By the late 1980s, math standards had embraced “discovery-based learning,” according to the Tribune News Service.

Unfortunately, a robust body of research has since found that such approaches often fail early math learners (and readers, for that matter). Math rules and facts such as multiplication tables must be taught explicitly, memorised and mastered through practice. Only when this foundation is established can students progress to more complex concepts. Math, it’s often said, is cumulative.

Yet many teachers colleges are still resistant to such findings. Make math engaging, their thinking goes, and children will excel. Stop memorizing facts (it’s “rote”) and eliminate timed tests (they cause anxiety). Academics often call such educational approaches “student-centered.” Yet they lack scientific rigor and have never produced the promised gains in achievement.