EdTech Insiders: This Week in Edtech
Death to Math! Long Live Analytical Problem Solving
This week, the NAEP report showed us that low-income K-12 students in the US experienced major learning losses during the COVID pandemic in both math and reading.
Research has documented the profound effect school closures had on low-income students and on Black and Hispanic students, in part because their schools were more likely to continue remote learning for longer periods of time.
Yikes. More remote learning = more learning inequity and sharper learning loss?
Yes, of course, we all know that what happened during the pandemic was ‘emergency online teaching’, not high-quality remote instruction. We also know that student absences doubled during the pandemic, and that working parents had far less opportunity to support at-home learning. All true..
…but I think this apologist thinking lets us in Edtech off the hook far too easily. When in-person instruction fell ill after decades of daily performances, and Edtech finally got to take center stage… it failed.
Hard.
And particularly painful, to me, are the findings in math.
That’s because Edtech has been focusing on teaching math for generations. In fact, Edtech has been partial to math as a subject since the days of Skinner’s Arithmetic Teaching Machine (1957), through Number Munchers (1986) and up to Prisms VR today.
Consider a very partial list of math Edtech strategies and illustrative products:
Adaptive Learning (Carnegie Learning, ALEKS, Dreambox Learning)
Gamified Learning (Mangahigh, Coolmath Games, Dragonbox Learning)
Comprehensive Free Curricula (Khan Academy, Illustrative Math, CK12)
High-Quality Publisher Content (MyMathLab, iReady, Everyday Math)
Engaging Video (Hundreds of Youtube creators, Nearpod, Brainpop)
Not only are there lots of options, but in all that time, we’ve also gotten pretty decent at math teaching!
45 Math products on Edreports “Meet Expectations”
17 Math interventions meet the highest level of effectiveness in the What Works Clearinghouse (including several tech-based curricula)
Certain heavily researched math programs, like ASSISTments, have outsized effects on student outcomes.
Math is also a topic in which we’ve learned a lot from effective international education; especially top performers like Singapore, China and Japan.
So if there are lots of math solutions available, several of which have been proven effective, and every public K12 school has curriculum and ostensibly teachers, and there are huge numbers of free, supplemental options, then why did the scores go down so dramatically?
There are many contributing factors, but for my money, one stands out above the rest.
Most people fear math- and associate it with people they don’t want to become.
Approximately 93% of adult Americans indicate that they experience math anxiety (Source). In other words, just about everybody.
In the 2012 PISA study, more than half of 15-year-olds worldwide stated that they worry that math class will be difficult and they will get poor marks. These numbers of 5-10% worse for girls (OECD)
Generations of children in the US have seen popular culture portray math students as ‘nerds’ or outsiders.
To be fair, there have been some noble attempts to make math more engaging, or at least associate it with more interesting people:
But in 2022, I think we to go further. Math needs a total rebrand… and I think Edtech can and should help lead the way.
A thought experiment: If one hears an adult friend say "My daughter’s really into spelling,” or “My daughter’s really into grammar”, one thinks “that’s nice. I bet she’s probably a bit nerdy, a rule-follower, maybe a bit antisocial and cerebral.”
But if the same friend says “My daughter’s really into creative writing,” or “My daughter’s really into scriptwriting,” that’s a very different connotation. A mysterious world-builder, a rule-breaker, maybe the next Shonda Rimes?
But in school, these are the same subject- English and Language Arts. Spelling and grammar are the underlying frameworks; creative writing and scriptwriting are the applied output.
And the same dichotomy applies to “math”! Wouldn’t you much rather a child be devoted to ‘fashion design’ or ‘data science’ or ‘computational neuroscience’ then plain old ‘math’?
Calculators calculate. Computers compute. People analyze and solve problems- often using numbers, statistics, analytical reasoning and algorithms.
As Duolingo enters the math world with its gamified approach (see below), I implore all of us in Edtech to build on their example and give math the boost it so deserves.
1. Duolingo launches its Math beta
Language App Duolingo Wants To Be Your Kid’s Math Tutor - Forbes
Duolingo has math now (and it’s kind of hard) - The Verge
Duolingo is debuting its much-hyped math app this week - Fast Company
2. Back to School (University)
New Data from IPEDS about Pandemic College Enrollees for the 2020-2021 school year (PhilonEdtech)
Overall, 46% of students in the 2020-21 year took only online courses and 34% took a mix of online and face-to-face, totaling 80% taking at least some online courses (up from 76% in Fall 2020)
More than 1.3 million students have dropped out of college since beginning of pandemic. Three quarters of bachelor’s degree students who have considered dropping out in past six months cite emotional stress as the reason: 34% increase from previous Gallup-Lumina report in 2020.
One State Offers Lessons In How To Cope With The College Enrollment Crisis - The Hechinger Report
Maine has seen an estimated 10 percent decline over the last 10 years in its number of new high school graduates… Yet UMaine has managed to increase its undergraduate enrollment during that period by about 5 percent.
The university has done this by luring out-of-staters with in-state tuition prices and by breaking with long-standing attitudes through which higher education sometimes alienates rather than embraces prospective applicants (e.g., “enlisting everyone on campus, and not just admissions officers, in the job of recruiting students.”).
3. Back to School (K12)- Major Learning Loss
The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading (NYTimes)
The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.
In math, Black students lost 13 points, compared with five points among white students, widening the gap between the two groups. Research has documented the profound effect school closures had on low-income students and on Black and Hispanic students, in part because their schools were more likely to continue remote learning for longer periods of time.
4. Back to School (K12)- Regional Teacher Shortages
America’s new “national teacher shortage” is neither new nor national Economist/Yahoo
A government survey in June found that 47% of schools needed to fill a vacancy in special education, compared with only 11% in physical education. Non-white schools and schools in areas of high poverty face more pressure to hire than whiter and richer schools, and they have struggled with teacher shortages for decades.
According to US Dept. of Education, all 50 states have reported shortages in at least one subject area – but shortages vary substantially across states and districts largely due to differentials in pay and working conditions
One constant: shortages of well-prepared teachers have historically been most severe in schools that serve larger numbers of students from low-income families and students of color and in subjects with greater opportunity costs (like special ed, mathematics, and science)
How Bad Is the Teacher Shortage? Depends Where You Live. - New York Times - 29 August 2022
According to one national survey by Education Week, nearly three-fourths of principals and district officials said this summer that the number of teaching applicants was not enough to fill their open positions. Other surveys released this year have suggested that parents are deeply concerned about staffing and that many more teachers are eyeing the exits.
Teacher shortage tied to education programs' enrollment drop - Inside Higher Ed
Nearly 70% Of LA Teachers Have Seriously Considered Quitting, Study Finds – The Guardian
The ‘Mass Exodus’ of Teachers Never Happened, Paper Argues – T74
5. Career Education and Return on Educational Investment
‘Academic Career Plans’ Have Students Exploring Careers as Early as Kindergarten - The 74Million
New Poll From Third Way Shows Voters Want Accountability For Career Education Programs – Forbes
Over 1700 career education programs leave their graduates earning less than the average income of a worker with a high school diploma
Higher Education Act (HET) is supposed to protect students from these poorly performing programs and stop taxpayer dollars from flowing to those programs in form of federal financial aid
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