College Preparation, Curriculum, Curriculum - Math, School Climate

A Letter to Jay Matthews

4 Comments

To Jay Matthews:
Let me suggest that Gerald Bracey is not an appropriate person to quote when dealing with mathematics education. First, it was TIMSS in 1995 rather than 1999 when students in the last year of high school were tested. Second, while some of our students who took the advanced math test had only had precalculus, all of them had studied geometry and we did worse in geometry than we did in calculus. Bracey never mentions this. Check the figures yourself to see the disastrous results in geometry.
We had 14% of our students take this test so the fact that some other countries did not test students in vocational tracts is irrelevant since they have a much larger fraction of their students in academic programs than 14%, as we do. About the ETS restudy, while they claim that the original sample was not comparable with other countries, their population was also not comparable with that of other countries. When you take the top say 7% of our students, judged by the courses they take which is not a perfect match but
not bad, and compare them with the top say 20% of the students in another country, that is not the same as comparing them with the top 7% in another country. ETS never mentions this in their press releases on this study.
Richard Askey

4 thoughts on “A Letter to Jay Matthews”

  1. You write:
    “Let me suggest that Gerald Bracey is not an appropriate person to quote when dealing with mathematics education. ”
    Why is he not appropriate to quote? What do you mean by “not appropriate?”

  2. I am definitely confused by Prof Askey’s post. I have not found the article or articles in which Jay Matthews references Gerald Bracey so I cannot evaluate what was said.
    The link to Jay Matthews is to a general list of Matthews articles, only one of which is about math (8th grade algebra), and it does not refer to Bracey.
    Then, of course, I do not have know how Matthews’ used Bracey’s materials in his article(s), because there are no specific references to Bracey’s discussion of TIMSS nor its context, etc.
    I have read a number of Bracey’s books and articles whose contents were typically well thought out (especially in pointing at both sides typical misuse of statistics and non-sequiturs). As an aside, however, I don’t agree with Bracey that our schools are doing a good job, notwithstanding his justified criticism of others’ logic.
    In order to make sense of this posting, I need references to the primary materials.

  4. In the October 26, 2008 issue of the Boston Globe, Jay Mathews had an article “Grade Change” in which he argued that US students were not being out performed by students in other countries. Part of his argument came from material Gerald Bracey has written about how TIMSS mathematics results have been interpreted.
    Here is a url for the Boston Globe article
    http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/10/26/grade_change/
    In 1995, not 1999 as claimed in this article, there was a test of students taking advanced mathematics in their last year of high school.  Bracey pointed out that some of the US students tested had only taken precalculus, yet calculus was one of the three areas tested, the others being numbers and equations (think of this as algebra), and geometry.  Here is how the US did in these three areas relative to the international average.
                             US        Average
    Numbers and equations     459        501
    Calculus                  450        501
    Geometry                  424        500
    All of our students taking this test had studied geometry.  To get a real comparison, we had 14% of our students sampled. In Algebra, Austria with 33% had the lowest score, 412, then Germany with 26% and 457, then the US.  In Calculus, Austria was again lower at 439, then the US.  In Geometry we were the lowest of all countries, the next being Austria 38 points higher. France, with 20% sampled, had scores of 548, 560 and 544 respectively. The larger the group being sampled, the lower one expects the scores to be.  For example, Slovenia sampled 75% of their students. Their scores were 491, 471 and 476 respectively, all significantly higher than the 14% in the US, but below the international average.  However, when one looks at the top 10%, Slovenia’s average was the top one at 629, while the US average was 485.
    There is much more at
    http://timss.bc.edu/timss1995i/TIMSSPDF/C_admath.pdf
    Much more can be written, but check out the figures and if you agree with Bracey that they do not show problems, explain why.  Part of the explanation about only precalculus is that many precalculus courses have somethings about derivatives, not all of the problems in the calculus part of this exam were calculus, and in general in TIMSS when a subject has just been introduced the questions are on the simple side. They become more complicated when a subject was studied earlier, which is a good reason to be very concerned about our very low score in geometry.  The problems were a bit harder and our score was far too low.
    Richard Askey

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