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Give Ontario Kids a Chance
December 01, 2010 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) at 04:41 PM
Speaking of shortfalls in math, here's an interesting posting from the blog Do The Math. Approaches to teaching math tend to be either "constructivist" (emphasizing understanding), or "traditional" (emphasizing fluency in math algorithms). The US Department of Education is sponsoring a comparison of textbooks in order to see which approach is more effective. Preliminary results support the traditional approach - which will come as no surprise to most readers of this blog.
The textbooks being compared are, of course, American, but Ontario parents may be interested to know that all of the textbooks approved for class use in the province emphasize the constructivist approach to teaching math.
“Although you may have heard, by professors of education or at parent nights hosted by schools, that the “research shows” that constructivist methods work best or algorithms are harmful to children, I have not been able to find any valid research articles that support this (nor was Herb Wilf able to find anything when he embarked on this task – there is a link to his article on the side of the page).”
Neither have I, and as a parent I found no math research to support any reasons that were given to me, why I should follow the same methods, when tutoring my child at home.
Further down in the article, ” A very intelligent and well-read cognitive psychologist did, however, point out some articles to me that show that many of the methods purported to be effective by so-called progressive math educators are actually not as effective as more traditional methods. One that comes to mind concerns the use of manipulatives in teaching mathematical concepts. It turns out that, when a manipulative is too colourful, or has many attributes that a child sees as interesting, he or she becomes distracted by the colours and properties of the manipulative and then has trouble learning the intended mathematical concept (makes sense, doesn’t it?).”
http://ahypatia.wordpress.com/
I soon learned from the cognitive science files, that bright colours, very busy pages of math text books are not good for my LD child, nor for the other children. They do end up having trouble learning the math concept.
Cognitive science is stripping bare the constructivist methods that are employed in our public education system and the text books. Whether it is math, science, social studies, or other subjects, the constructivist methods are being proven as being the poor cousin to the mastery and fluency methods.