Search results for: connected math

Susan Bromley: On average, less than one-third of students in third through eighth grades in the

This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“. deja vu. I “prompted” grok, gemini and Claude for summaries of this report. Grok’s intro plug: (The study) compares […]

Corrinne Hess: In late 2025, legislative Republicans introduced a bill to strengthen math education for Wisconsin’s youngest students.  The plan would have required schools to implement consistent math assessments and intervention plans for students who fell behind in math — similar to the sweeping reading legislation known as Act 20 passed in 2023.  The bill didn’t […]

Kelsey Piper: For decades, kids were getting better at math. The best measure of this — the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long-Term Trend assessment — displays a long climb from 1978 until 2012, when 13-year-old math performance peaked. By 2025, we had wiped out over three decades of gains and were roughly back to […]

Melissa Manno: The “Back to Basics in Math” law, passed as part of the state budget last month, requires school districts to use “evidence-based” methods in elementary school math classrooms. | Fernando Veloso Leão/corelens | Illustration: New York Focus At New York Focus, our central mission is to help readers better understand how New York really […]

Holly Korbey In James Bell’s math class at Chapman High School, sophomores are trying to pinpoint exactly where two lines cross. The students in this rural Kansas high school already solved for that meeting point in previous lessons, using graphs and other techniques. But this recent lesson shows them how to use a matrix — […]

Shakiyya Bland: In recent years, particularly since the pandemic, countless news articles have bemoaned a crisis in math learning. Whether defined by introductory courses at Harvard University, math placement in the University of California or community college remedial courses, a consistent refrain is that students emerge from high school “profoundly underprepared” and opening access to math courses could mean “hurting students.”  […]

Ted Dintersmith Some leaders reduce our math crisis to two words: test scores. For decades, hopes of progress were dashed by flat to declining scores. Full-bore panic about fading global competitiveness. Urgent calls for more drills, worksheets, and double-dose tutoring. Whatever it takes, get those test scores up.  But here’s the real crisis. We teach the wrong math and test […]

Steven Yoder: Susan Gilkerson, a math teacher and school bus driver, stood before a South Dakota education board and issued a warning.  The proposed math standards the board was considering — just 36 pages, less than half the length of standards adopted in 2018 — were so scant that teachers won’t know how to use them, […]

Cheryl Chan Her call to action is echoed, on a much larger scale, by math and education experts alarmed over Canadian students’ declining math performance on global tests. A recent report from the C.D. Howe Institute called it an “urgent national concern” that requires immediate action by provincial governments. The report highlighted Canada’s performance over the past […]

Erin Gretzinger: The School Board approved a $4.9 million purchase of new math curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grade Monday after a task force concluded some of the district’s current instructional materials are “outdated.” School district administrators say the curriculum from Arizona-based Illustrative Mathematics checked many of their boxes after a thorough selection process, and a nonprofit that reviews instructional […]

Erin Eritzinger After screening bids to ensure the materials met mandatory requirements, the school district’s K8 Math Leadership team sent along four proposals for further consideration by a larger selection committee. That committee included 40 people across 21 schools and the district’s central office, as well as School Board member Ali Muldrow and Lisa Hennessey, […]

Quinton Klabon: Oh, no… Madison, Wisconsin, picked Illustrative Math for kindergarten through 8th grades. Shoot. Much discussion occurred about math identities, meaning making instead of memorization, and significant reading to solve problems. Milwaukee also uses it for 6th through 8th. —— “The commercial math-education sector is flooded with ineffective math programs and T professional development […]

Ian Jones, Chris Wheadon, Sara Humphries, Matthew Inglis: Advanced-level (A-level) mathematics is a high-profile qualification taken by many school leavers in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and around the world as preparation for university study. Concern has been expressed in these countries that standards in A-level mathematics have declined over time, and that school leavers enter […]

Nathaniel Hansford Last There has been much discussion over the last 5 years on an alleged reading crisis in the United States and the western world (Hanford, 2022). The argument has essentially been that reading achievement scores are falling and that Balanced Literacy is to blame (Hanford, 2022). However, in my opinion the state of […]

Kristen Smith: A parent of a 10th grade student came into school to talk to me the other day. He was helping his son with a Physics assignment, and he said that as they were working through an equation together, he realized that his son didn’t have his multiplication facts mastered. He wanted to come […]

Allysia Finley: Because so many incoming students were numerically illiterate, the university added a remedial class for middle- and elementary-school math. Remarkably, among students placed into that math course, 94% had completed an advanced math class in high school (e.g., pre-calculus, calculus or statistics) and received an average A- in their math courses. Is this […]

Rose Horowitch: For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus. Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San […]

Kelsey Piper: The question that captured the world’s attention was 7 + 2 = [_] + 6. There’s no trick; it’s as easy as it looks. The answer is 3. The question was posed to students in the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) fast-growing remedial math class, Math 2, and one-quarter of them got it wrong, […]

Bloomberg: 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. In the early 20th century, education reformers including John Dewey and William […]

Corrinne Hess: ….. a bill will be introduced soon that will include math screeners to provide testing and individualized plans to help struggling students catch up.  “This bill is not going to be the full solution to the problem, but I think it’s going to be a very good first step in addressing a very […]

Benjamin Solomon: The refrain has been broadcast widely: New York math achievement, as measured on a respected national test, is in the dumps. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 37% of New York 4th graders scored proficient relative to 39% overall for the nation.1 The situation was worse for 8th graders, with only 26% […]

Families For New York: A guest post by Professor Benjamin Solomon on the multiple omissions and inaccuracies in the newly released NY math briefs and why they should be withdrawn Today I am sharing a guest post by Benjamin, an Associate Professor in School Psychology at the University of Albany, about what is wrong with the […]

Joanne Jacobs Summary: Teacher training at a well-respected university focused on social justice, cultural relevance, students’ psychology — but not how to teach math, an engineer turned math teacher tells Holly Korbey in an interview. “Yellow Heights,” as he calls himself, is the author of Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher. Yellow Heights was […]

Corrinne Hess: State Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, was one of the authors of the reading bill known as Act 20. He says he now wants to create similar legislation for math.  During a press conference on Sept. 10, Kitchens said a bill will be introduced soon that will include math screeners to provide testing […]

Wall Street Journal: Since 2013 NAEP math scores have dropped 11 points for eighth-graders and five points for fourth-graders—and the declines are steepest for the lowest-performing students. Twelfth-grade scores have dropped six points. Thirty-nine percent of eighth-graders and 45% of twelfth-graders scored below “basic” proficiency in 2024.  Scores were trending up before 2013, so what […]

Jordana Hunter and Nick Parkinson Adults use maths every day, whether it’s to compare grocery prices, pay bills or interpret statistics in the news. Adults with weak maths skills are more likely to struggle with employment, have poor mental healthand suffer homelessness. When students feel anxious about maths, it can impede their performance. While a little stress […]

Lee Fang: These foundations are eliminating middle school algebra and promoting “numberless math,” which is leaving students paying the price. Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After […]

Rick Hess: enjoyed reading your recent discussion with Alex Baron, “How Much Autonomy Should Teachers Have Over Instructional Materials?” In particular, I was struck by your skepticism about whether “high-quality instructional materials” are always high quality. I have a lot of sympathy for your observation that: “A lot of these determinations seem to depend heavily […]

Anna Stokke: It is often desirable to explain why standard methods work using pictures and blocks but these concrete materials should not be used as actual strategies for working through arithmetic problems – our ancestors moved beyond such primitive techniques centuries ago. These convoluted strategies take up so much time that children are still working […]

Link: The recently released New York math briefs (found here) are not scientific and describe questionable practices. Many of these practices have been shown through decades of rigorous research to be ineffective, especially for students struggling with mathematics. These briefs should be withdrawn. This letter (read below) outlines serious concerns regarding grave omissions and inaccuracies in […]

Sara Randazzo: Last fall, Harvard expanded its entry-level math offerings, with a new version of its introductory calculus course that meets five days a week instead of the usual four. Students are given a skills test to determine whether they need the extended course, Kelly said. The extra time each week is devoted to reviewing […]

Ulcca Joshi Hansen and Dave Kung: What Maryland students need is an approach that focuses on conceptual understanding, while building fluency with a few core procedures — exactly the approach laid out in the proposal. Here’s what needs to change to prepare Maryland students with math skills to thrive in today’s world: 1. Update math content: When every […]

Corrine Hess: The difference, Sturmer said, is that Winskill focused on teaching math — and made sure its teachers were using the latest evidence-based practices, not just teaching it the same way they learned when they were in school. “It comes down to teaching the why behind mathematics and how things work,” he said. “Not […]

Madison Education Partnership: When we dig deeper on summative and formative exams, we find extreme inequities in performance by student demographic group and in specific content areas. For example, in 6th grade, the typical student from a low-income family is two or more grade levels behind in algebra and in numbers and operations while the […]

Heather Peske It’s nearly universal: Teachers with master’s degrees almost always get paid more than teachers without. The presumption is that the master’s degree signals a greater level of knowledge and skill. But what if I told you that aspiring elementary math teachers who go through graduate-level teacher prep are often less prepared than teachers who go […]

Corrine Hess: Almost 25 percent of Wisconsin fourth graders lack basic math knowledge NCTQ evaluated 22 elementary teacher prep programs in Wisconsin to determine if they dedicate enough time to key math content topics and math pedagogy. The report found 14 percent of the state’s programs earned an “A+” or an “A” by dedicating at least […]

Teacher Prep Review: Unfortunately, many elementary students in the United States do not receive adequate math instruction. Nearly a quarter of fourth graders, over 850,000 children in the U.S.4—roughly the entire population of San Francisco—lack basic math knowledge and skills, such as locating numbers on a number line or subtracting multidigit whole numbers.5 Improving math […]

Anna Stokke: Wanted to share a video of a presentation to a public school board in Northern California about ‘Math Fact Fluency’ given by a friend and colleague: The main presenter — David Margulies — is a parent and former IBM Ph.D research staff member who worked in materials science his entire career and has […]

more. 2007 math forum audio video  Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Greg Ashman: Thousands of primary school students will be tested on their mathematics knowledge as part of a landmark NSW numeracy screening trial to be rolled out from next term. NSW will run the maths screening check for year 1 students across 150 public schools, testing about 5000 pupils on basic skills including counting, ordering […]

Christopher Harris Fewer students may be choosing to study higher-level maths for the HSC because they had been taught by primary school teachers who were “maths avoiders” and developed a negative attitude toward the subject, Sydney University vice-chancellor Professor Mark Scott has said. Scott made the comments at an Engineers Australia conference on Wednesday, an […]

Anna Stocke: US students’ poor performance on TIMSS has received much media attention. Canadian students scored worse than US students. Why is this not receiving the same degree of attention? —— 2007 math forum audio video  Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of […]

Jill Barshay: You may have seen the headlines about the horrid math skills of U.S. children, but a few of the details in the 2023 TIMSS international test score report are fascinating. Let’s dig in with pictures.. —- 2007 math forum audio video  Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A Stands for […]

Dr. Darja Barr, Dr. Jim Clark, Dr. James Currie, Dr. Payman Eskandari, Dr. Shakhawat Hossain, Dr. Narad Rampersad, Dr. Anna Stokke, Dr. Ross Stokke and Dr. Matthew Wiersma: “ai” summary: A review of references cited by Dr. Martha Koch found no credible support for her claims that recent amendments to Manitoba’s Teaching Certificates and Qualifications […]

Corrinne Hess Changes to UW-Madison’s School of Education math requirements Steffen Lempp, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says over the last decade, the School of Education has changed how prospective K-8 teachers are taught math content to fully prepare them to teach children in the subject.  The UW-Madison math department used to […]

Barry Garelick and JR Wilson: From the foreword by Paul A. Kirschner, Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology – Open University of the Netherlands; Guest Professor – Thomas More University of Applied Sciences “This book will, hopefully, provide an arsenal of tools and techniques to break through this downward spiral in teaching and learning math. First off, it […]

via Anna Stokke: Distressing changes Re: Teachers need subject expertise (Think Tank, Nov. 12) I’m writing, as a parent and as an educator, in support of my colleague Anna Stokke’s Monday op-ed. Having spent two decades teaching post-secondary students in Manitoba, I am distressed, to say the least, to hear about the revisions to Manitoba’s […]

Anna Stokke In answer to Martha Koch’s opinion piece, “absolutely,” and I say that as a scientist with 40 years of experience in the biology of behaviour, but the crackpot ideas of self-described “researchers” that have held sway for the last 30 years with respect to influencing educational policy are the least reliable basis for […]

Alberta Parents Union: We are urgently calling on Alberta to teach math teachers to teach math! That may seem like a silly request, but read on to find out which math-like-substance is being sold to teachers as “teaching math” now. It’s a perennial struggle in parent advocacy. Parents want to know the basics are being […]

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan Kulkarni and her colleagues also used information networks to compare Bach’s music with listeners’ perception of it. They started with an existing computer model based on experiments in which participants reacted to a sequence of images on a screen. The researchers then measured how surprising an element of the sequence was. They adapted […]

My mom cried during the SpaceX launch. She’s a math teacher. “So many people in the education world want to get rid of advanced math for equity. I’m sick of it. Without math, this [launch] can’t happen. Kids need to be allowed to dream.” Spot on, mom 🇺🇸pic.twitter.com/LsGvs9WM5O — Max Meyer (@mualphaxi) November 18, 2023 […]

Sharon Lurye: A few years ago she shifted her approach, turning to more direct explanation after finding a website on a set of evidence-based practices known as the science of math. “I could see how the game related to multiplication, but the kids weren’t making those connections,” said Stark, a math teacher in the suburbs […]

Wesley Crocket: Faculty members in the University of California (UC) system have begun to speak out against their campuses’ adoption of lower math standards in order to bolster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The controversy surrounds a policy enacted by a UC committee in 2020, which changed the admissions requirements for high school applicants in […]

Noah Smith: “The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.” — John Dewey A couple of weeks ago, Armand Domalewski wrote a guest post for Noahpinion about how the new California Math Framework threatened to dumb down math education in the state — for example, by forbidding kids from taking algebra before high school: […]

Lucy Kellaway: Some years ago, shortly before I left the Financial Times, I gave a talk at a literary event in Oxford. Put up your hand, I said to the audience, if you are useless at maths — whereupon the arms of around a third of them shot into the air. At the time, I […]

Summer Allen: A new study finds that high school students identify more with math if they see their math teacher treating everyone in the class equitably, especially in racially diverse schools. The study by researchers at Portland State University, Loyola University Chicago and the University of North Texas was published in the journal Sociology of […]

Ellen Gamerman: On RussianMathTutors.com, a site promoting a Soviet-era style of math instruction, a sample question involves Masha, a mom who bakes a batch of unmarked pies: three rice, three bean and three cherry. The student must determine how Masha can find a cherry pie “by biting into as few tasteless pies as possible.” While […]

Sumit Agarwal, Andrea Presbitero, André F. Silva, and Carlo Wix: We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify the cross-subsidy from naive to sophisticated consumers in retail financial markets. Using granular data on the near universe of credit card accounts in the United States, we find that sophisticated consumers profit from reward […]

Sarah Mervosh: It’s just after lunchtime, and Dori Montano’s fifth-grade math class is running on a firm schedule. In one corner of the classroom, Ms. Montano huddles with a small group of students, working through a lesson about place value: Is 23.4 or 2.34 the bigger number? Nearby, other students collaborate to solve a “math […]

Joe Hong: At the heart of the wrangling lies a broad agreement about at least one thing:The way California public schools teach math isn’t working. On national standardized tests, California ranks in the bottom quartile among all states and U.S. territories for 8th grade math scores. Yet for all the sound and fury, the proposed framework, about 800-pages […]

Signatories: 1,105 as of November 5, 2021 California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way. Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most […]

The Economist: America has a maths problem. Its pupils have ranked poorly in international maths exams for decades. In 2018, American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. American adults ranked fourth-from-last in numeracy when compared with other rich countries. As many as 30% of American adults are comfortable only […]

Jacey Fortin: If everything had gone according to plan, California would have approved new guidelines this month for math education in public schools. But ever since a draft was opened for public comment in February, the recommendations have set off a fierce debate over not only how to teach math, but also how to solve […]

Scott Girard: Key findings include that classroom and school belonging are distinct and that teachers with more confidence in their ability to teach math had a stronger sense of classroom belonging among their students. The research also found there was no systematic difference in math classroom belonging across racial/ethnic groups or by gender. “I’m heartened […]

Steve Miller: As they reel from revenue losses connected to the pandemic, many colleges and universities are racking up other costs not likely to turn up in their glossy brochures or as line items on staggering tuition bills: untold millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements for allegedly violating the rights of students, professors, […]

Joanne Jacobs: California’s new Mathematics Curriculum Framework has become a political hot potato, reports Lawrence Richard on Yahoo News. The state education board will postpone a decision on implementation for 10 months in response to critics who charged it would “de-mathematize math” and prevent high achievers from taking advanced classes. 2007 Math Forum Connected Math Discovery […]

Independent Institute: California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way. Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most when schools fail to teach […]

George Zacharopoulos, Francesco Sella & Roi Cohen Kadosh: Formal education has a long-term impact on an individual’s life. However, our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education, such as in mathematics, is currently poor but is highly relevant given the extant differences between countries in their educational curricula and the differences in […]

Elizabeth Green: When Akihiko Takahashi was a junior in college in 1978, he was like most of the other students at his university in suburban Tokyo. He had a vague sense of wanting to accomplish something but no clue what that something should be. But that spring he met a man who would become his […]

Caroline Downey: Democratic Virginia state Senator J. Chapman Petersen is one of many parents voicing concerns about a new racial equity push that would eliminate certain advanced placement classes in the state’s mathematics curriculum. The Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI) would replace the traditional mathematics progression of Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2 courses with courses […]

Sergiu Klainerman: I am not at all qualified to introduce today’s guest writer, Sergiu Klainerman. I barely eked out a C+ in high school calculus, while Sergiu is a professor of mathematics at Princeton who specializes in the mathematical theory of black holes. He’s been a MacArthur fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and is a member […]

Scott Miller: There are a lot of good points being made in this thread. I have had a theory that it is in part related to the funding available for lab equipment and computers. During the latter half of the 20th century, in Russia you were very lucky to get access to a “real” computer. […]

Ben Eisen & Adrienne Roberts: Mr. Jones, now 22 years old, walked out with a gray Accord sedan with heated leather seats. He also took home a 72-month car loan that cost him and his then-girlfriend more than $500 a month. When they split last year and the monthly payment fell solely to him, it […]

John Baez: In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the study of geometry using algebra. Around 1637, René Descartes laid the groundwork for this subject by taking a plane, mentally drawing a grid on it, as we […]

nctm: Current mathematics education research is used to frame equity-based teaching practices through three lenses useful for building one’s teaching: reflecting , noticing , and engaging in community . Reflecting . Equity-based teaching requires a substantial amount of reflection, which involves not just reflecting on your pedagogy and your classroom norms, but also considering how […]

Charlotte Yang: Chinese high school students generally outperform their western peers at math — at least, that’s what many in the country believe. That assumption was shattered Monday, when China placed a mediocre sixth at the 2019 Romanian Master of Mathematics (RMM), a major math competition for pre-university students. The U.S. won the championship for […]

Math from Three to Seven: A question of culture When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley (in the late 1980s), it was under- stood, among my American classmates, that the Eastern Europeans were simply better. They weren’t genetically superior; indeed, many of my Amer- ican classmates, myself included, were themselves descended from Eastern […]

Evelyn Lamb: In 1950 Edward Nelson, then a student at the University of Chicago, asked the kind of deceptively simple question that can give mathematicians fits for decades. Imagine, he said, a graph — a collection of points connected by lines. Ensure that all of the lines are exactly the same length, and that everything […]

James Tanton: It is astounding to me that mathematics – of all school subjects – elicits such potent emotional reaction when “reform” is in the air. We’ve seen the community response to the Common Core State Standards in the U.S., the potency of the Back to Basics movement in Alberta, Canada, and the myriad of […]

Chris Papst: Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state test scores released this fall. We paged through 16,000 lines of data and uncovered this: Of Baltimore City’s 39 High Schools, 13 had zero students proficient in math. Digging further, we found another six high schools where one percent tested proficient. Add it up – in half the […]

Amber Walker: MMSD highlighted the success of the new math curriculum in its annual report, released last July. The report said the first cohort of schools using Bridges saw an eight-point increase in math proficiency scores and nine-point gains in math growth in one school year on the spring Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) exam […]

Ji Li: You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is that your brain can quickly decide if a question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose “machines” (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences […]

Devlin: My May post is more than a little late. The initial delay was caused by a mountain of other deadlines. When I did finally start to come up for air, there just did not seem to be any suitable math stories floating around to riff off, but I did not have enough time to […]

Slashdot.org: “I have two daughters now who are perfectly good in math, but they had one or two bad math teachers and they are done. That’s what happens to girls. They walk away from tech and science. And there’s something going on that is not just about the girls. There’s something going on with how […]

James Wollack and Michael Fish: Major Findings CORE-Plus students performed significantly less well on math placement test and ACT-M than did traditional students Change in performance was observed immediately after switch Score trends throughout CORE-Plus years actually decreased slightly Inconsistent with a teacher learning-curve hypothesis CORE-AP students fared much better, but not as well as […]

Kevin Carey: The problem, from a regulatory standpoint, is that they borrow a lot of money to obtain the degree — over $78,000 on average, according to the university. The total tuition is $62,593. And because it’s a graduate program, students can also borrow the full cost of their living expenses from the federal government, […]

Cory Koedel and Morgan Polikoff, via a kind Dan Dempsey email: Textbooks are one of the most widely used educational inputs, but remarkably little is known about their effects on student learning. This report uses data collected from elementary schools in California to estimate the impacts of mathematics textbook choices on student achievement. We study […]

Keith Devlin: If you are connected with the world of K-12 mathematics education, it’s highly unlikely that a day will go by without you uttering, writing, hearing, or reading the term “number sense”. In contrast everyone else on the planet would be hard pressed to describe what it is. Though entering the term into Google […]

Madison School District Administration (PDF): Project Description: MMSD has provided funding to support coursework in the content and teaching knowledge of middle school teachers of math. Toward that goal, a partnership was formed back in 2010 between the District, the UW-Madison School of Education, the UW- Madison Department of Mathematics, and the University of Wisconsin […]

James Astill: Yet my children’s experience of school in America is in some ways as indifferent as their swimming classes are good, for the country’s elementary schools seem strangely averse to teaching children much stuff. According to the OECD’s latest international education rankings, American children are rated average at reading, below average at science, and […]

Kevin Hartnett “Overall, there’s a movement towards more complex cognitive mathematics, there’s a movement towards the student being invited to act like a mathematician instead of passively taking in math and science,” said David Baker, a professor of sociology and education at Pennsylvania State University. “These are big trends and they’re quite revolutionary.” Pedagogical revolutions […]

Kevin Hartnett: If we could snap our fingers and change the way math and science are taught in U.S. schools, most of us would. The shortcomings of the current approach are clear. Subjects that are vibrant in the minds of experts become lifeless by the time they’re handed down to students. It’s not uncommon to […]

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Scientific American has a guest blog post with the title: Mathematicians Are Overselling the Idea That “Math Is Everywhere, which argues in its subtitle: The mathematics that is most important to society is the province of the exceptional few—and that’s always been true. Now I’m not really interested in the substantial argument […]

Vauhini Vara: Teachers pack their items outside of Everest College, in City of Industry, California, one of the shuttered Corinthian Colleges. Last year, I met fifteen former students and graduates of Corinthian Colleges who had taken a remarkable action to protest the collection of their student debt. Corinthian, a for-profit institution that was, at the […]

Erica Klarreich: his Yale University colleague Gil Kalai about a computer science problem he was working on, concerning how to “sparsify” a network so that it has fewer connections between nodes but still preserves the essential features of the original network. Network sparsification has applications in data compression and efficient computation, but Spielman’s particular problem […]

John Steele Gordon: Mathematicians often deal in abstractions that are quite beyond the ken of non-mathematicians. For instance, in 1637, the Frenchman Pierre de Fermat conjectured that there is no whole-number solution for the equation An + Bn = Cn where N is greater than two. He famously wrote in the margin of a book […]