A Better Way to Teach Math

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

John Mighton’s Jump Math appears to be a better way to teach math — which isn’t hard to imagine:

Children come into school with differences in background knowledge, confidence, ability to stay on task and, in the case of math, quickness. In school, those advantages can get multiplied rather than evened out. One reason, says Mighton, is that teaching methods are not aligned with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and how learning happens.

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything. Children who struggle in math usually have difficulty remembering math facts, handling word problems and doing multi-step arithmetic (pdf). Despite the widespread support for “problem-based” or “discovery-based” learning, studies indicate that current teaching approaches underestimate the amount of explicit guidance, “scaffolding” and practice children need to consolidate new concepts. Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.

Mighton, who is also an award-winning playwright and author of a fascinating book called “The Myth of Ability,” developed Jump over more than a decade while working as a math tutor in Toronto, where he gained a reputation as a kind of math miracle worker. Many students were sent to him because they had severe learning disabilities (a number have gone on to do university-level math). Mighton found that to be effective he often had to break things down into minute steps and assess each student’s understanding at each micro-level before moving on.

This guided discovery process has yielded excellent results — but the teachers and the reporter don’t seem particularly math-savvy in describing those results:

“I was used to getting a bell curve in the past,” she told me, “but what I started seeing was all the kids getting between 90 and 100 percent on tests, and within months, they were all getting between 95 and 100 percent.”
[...]
Notably, the bell curve of the students’ scores shifted to the right and narrowed — which is to say that the performance differences between the “slow” kids and the “whiz” kids began to fade away.

Comments

  1. Aretae says:

    Sounds an awful lot like me in his analysis of the problem.

  2. Isegoria says:

    I thought the same thing, Aretae.

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