Let’s look at the labor demand expected in US by 2030.
McKinsey Global Institute recently published a report about automation in the US and its effect on the job market. It shows that there will be a drop in demand for labor with secondary or less education (due to Artificial Intelligence, robots, and other automation), and a jump in demand for a college-educated workforce.
Therefore, teachers will be expected to continue to make a push for college readiness to fulfill the market demand. However, according to The
Nation's Report Card only 25% of students performed at or above proficient level in math on the most recent assessment. Another report says, "
only about a third of U.S. high school seniors are prepared for college-level coursework in math and reading." There is no evidence that this trend is improving, and in 2016, Peggy Carr, acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, confirmed: “The decline is real."
It may look like a problem of high-school education, sometimes referred as the “Algebra Crisis.” If we look at the research, it has roots in early learning. Alan Schoenfeld from University of California, along with Deborah Stipek from Stanford University, analyzed data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Study by National Center for Education Statistics, and concluded that
“children who begin school with poor math skills typically do not catch up.” Children who have low math marks at the start of kindergarten continue to lag behind their better prepared peers until 8th grade.
Not only do students in the lowest quartile remain there, but the gap between them and their peers widens. By 8th grade, they performed at a level their peers had surpassed by grade 5.
George Duncan from Northwestern University has reported it is early math that’s key for later academic achievement (Duncan et al. (2007)). According to the study, the strongest predictors of later achievement are school-entry math readiness, reading, and attention skills.
Math is considered the ‘most predictive of subsequent achievement outcomes.’ Surprisingly, school-entry math skills are as predictive of later reading progress as are school-entry reading skills.
This correlates with another topic which is currently under the scrutiny of researchers, and familiar to many educators. Mindset, ‘a core belief about how they [people] learn’, is a term offered by Carol Dweck. According to her findings, there are two types of mindsets determining, but not limiting, a person's ability for intellectual development. The first one, known as fixed mindset, is formed when a person does not believe he or she can do better. It limits a student and makes stem stagnete. This could be caused by educational trauma or by a negative influence of environment.
The opposite to it is a growth mindset, when healthy self-esteem and confidence implicitly affect educational pathway and helps learners to move forward. A growth mindset can be present in any student, regardless of previous achievements, family status or academic background. ‘When people change their mindsets and start to believe that they can learn to high levels, they change their learning pathways (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007) and achieve at higher levels.’
Stanford professor, Jo Boaler, has been working on growth mindset when it comes to teaching math, to include creating great resources available for the teachers to foster growth mindset in their students. Boaler also reported how wrong messages affect early learners, especially girls. In childhood - as young as 5 years old, without knowing the subjects yet - students are exposed to the wrong messages, such as “We are not really a math family,” or “I was never good at math, ask your dad.” These types of math messages impact student, creating negative, often fixed, mindsets in mathematics learning. These messages begin early in education. Summing up the research, college math readiness is an issue - not only because there is an Algebra crisis, but because there is also a primary math crisis.
Your turn now -- what are your thoughts? Where do you see the most critical moments in math learning? The comment box is yours!
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