When I began my career, many years ago, I encountered a number of teaching challenges that did not seem to have easy solutions. As a post-graduate student I taught A Level maths to undergraduate Food Science students who had failed to achieve a ‘pass’ grade. Later on, I was tasked to teach maths to 13-year-old, severely dyslexic students who seemed unable to learn basic maths. I thought dyslexia was about language, about reading and, especially, about spelling. There seemed to be no source of wisdom, neither practical nor theoretical, about how this related to maths learning. The education world had yet to discover the word ‘dyscalculia’. My employers hadn’t told me about how to work with students with these learning difficulties, so, suddenly instead of being a successful teacher in mainstream education, I became a totally ineffective maths teacher in special education.
By happenstance, the school I worked at had an active link with a specialist school in Baltimore, USA. The joint Heads there had a great interest in children who could not learn maths and so I connected with them as I worked to resolve the persistent maths issues I was encountering in my classes. Three years after starting my new job, I left to become Head of the Baltimore school on a 1-year green card. This meant I could work and do research with the two Americans and gain access to the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, a University with experts in special needs in general and in maths learning difficulties in particular. I owe those people a great deal.
Over thirty years later I’m still learning.
Maths in the UK
Generally, in the UK, we are not doing all that well. We’ve been in the (low) twenties in the PISA ranking for a while now, and UK studies have suggested that over 20 per cent of young adults are functionally innumerate and only 22 per cent of adults have skills equivalent to a GCSE grade 4/C. Some recent initiatives, such as Shanghai Maths, have not produced the gains anticipated. It looks like the same is going to be the case for ‘Mastery’ learning.
My own research, part of my (large) data collection for a summative maths test, was the core of a paper published in 2013 in Mathematics Teaching, the Journal of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics, under the optimistic title of, ‘Is the population really woefully bad at maths?’ It contained some depressing results. The reliability of the data was analysed recently by an independent researcher and found to be excellent (Cronbach’s alpha around .93 in all age groups). This is encouraging, alongside being rather depressing, as these sample results show. The percentages are for correct answers:
5.67 km = _ m