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I'm a big fan of Singapore math. The countries that score top in the world on primary math education use it. In basically every research study that has been d
by btilly 4y ago
I'm a big fan of Singapore math. The countries that score top in the world on primary math education use it. In basically every research study that has been done, it works. 3/4 of my children were lucky enough to go to a school that taught it, and it worked well for them.
Unfortunately the US approach has been to throw out every research study suggesting it might work, while failing to fund better studies. See https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_singaporemath_122215.pdf https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_sin.... Behind this is that fact that the educational establishment makes a ton of money off of rewriting textbooks and retraining teachers for each reform wave. The hasty changes are guaranteed to lead to disaster, which motivates the NEXT reform wave, which they then also profit on. My mother became a school teacher in the 1950s, and this cycle was ALREADY in progress back then. (Think Sputnik leads to New Math leads to Why Johnny Can't Add, etc.)
Switching to already existing books for an approach that actually will work would be a disaster for the education establishment. And so we'll never do it. No matter how embarrassing our regular (but profitable for the education establishment) disasters are.
I complain about this occasionally. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822577 for a more general complaint, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a rant about the Common Core disaster specificially.
- bencpeters 4y agoWhat is the TL;DR version of the difference between Singapore math & US math education?
- btilly 4y agoSingapore math focuses on teaching every concept by first manipulating physical objects, then manipulating pictures, then manipulating abstract symbols. Encouraging children to draw connections between these. It also spreads each concept over time so that you keep revisiting the same ideas to ensure it gets fully integrated. And mixes them. So grade 1 kids may be doing "multiplication" by arranging blocks in a grid before they've fully mastered the + sign. The USA gives a much more cursory pass through operational actions and goes straight to the abstract representation. We also do a lot more of one concept at a time, only to move on to the next while kids forget the first. The result is that kids learn to blindly follow poorly learned procedures, hoping to do it well enough to pass the test before forgetting the concept. And then the following year do it all over again, having forgot the material from last year. Yeah, yeah, we have an official curriculum, sequencing, and there is lots of verbiage in official documents about how and when kids are supposed to get reminded, etc. But I described what ACTUALLY tends to happen. And you only have to glance at test scores to realize that the official narrative about what is learned is more myth than reality.
- huevosabio 4y agoThat sounds similar to how I learned math in Montessori in Grades 1-6. Every math concept had physical "materials" that we had to manipulate to get to the answer (e.g. for square root, you place N beads on a grid in a square form and count how many are on the side). Often, tricks to get quickly at the answer were discouraged early on to promote a proper "grasp" on what the operations entail.
- btilly 4y agoSingapore math was inspired largely by research from Jerome Bruner on how children learn. See https://singaporemathsclub.com/concrete-pictorial-and-abstract-how-one-psychologist-revolutionized-math-forever/ https://singaporemathsclub.com/concrete-pictorial-and-abstra... for more. His thinking at least parallels Marie Montessori's. There probably is some direct influence, but I couldn't find evidence of it in a quick search. However it does not surprise me that the approaches would work out to be similar.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoI'm embarrassed to say I've never heard of Singapore math. Are there any resources on it you'd recommend?
- btilly 4y agohttps://singaporemathlearningcenter.com/singapore-math-curriculum/what-is-singapore-math https://singaporemathlearningcenter.com/singapore-math-curri... is a decent place to start.
- generalizations 4y agoI can't speak to the alternatives, but I can confirm that Singapore math is how I learned and it worked really well. Was lucky enough to be homeschooled and my parents did the research to know about it, get the books, and give them to me. Kumquats and mangoes will forever be associated in my mind with elementary math word problems.
- api 4y agoA huge systematic problem across all of American society seems to be the prevalence of problems that are profitable to someone. This leads to many cases where people fight reform to maintain some kind of profitable niche in society. Housing shortages are profitable to property owners, bad rail infrastructure is profitable to airlines, complicated tax codes are profitable for accountants, bad foreign policy is profitable for defense contractors, etc. All complex societies suffer from this but it seems particularly bad in the USA for some reason.
- huevosabio 4y ago100%. The combination of "this problem has clear winners" and "anyone can veto any change, but no one can veto the status quo" makes for entrenched, powerful interests. I suspect that it is particularly bad in the US because our insane vetocracy.
- syntheweave 4y agoIt's bad because of the lack of a fitness function: if we do something inefficiently, but we can afford to pay for it(which we always have, because of resources, having-an-empire, new technologies, etc.), it just keeps going. Once the buck stops, heads roll, and the parts of US history where it got close to that, the textbooks like to say as little about as possible. So, most of the positive changes we make come from either random whims of the rich: "we can't have that here, my sinuses are too delicate", or moments of revolt that scare the rich into action. But the actions also tend to be random and often go down the authoritarian maintain-status-quo route.
- huevosabio 4y agoAre there after-school programs that have "Singapore math" or similar in the US? I've seen the Russian School of Mathematics and I wonder if there are other "foreign" style of math education. If so, I would consider enrolling my future children. When I grew up, I was enrolled in a bilingual school in middle-school. So I took math in Spanish (following the Mexican curriculum), and in English (following the US curriculum). I thought that was fantastic not because one or other was better (I can't recall) but because it gave different approaches to the same topics.