The Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education Conference 2012 will take place on 10 July 2012 at the Royal Society in London.
You're reading: Posts Tagged: education
Draft UK primary mathematics changes for consultation
The UK Government have released a draft primary school Programme of Study for mathematics for consultation.
The announcement was much covered in the press, which focused on the ‘back to basics’ approach. The Daily Mail reported that “times tables are to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at school for the first time in decades” with other details reported including learning how to calculate using decimal places and fractions, and dealing with numbers up to ten million.
The mathematics examinations faced by school leavers in the Republic of Ireland
This Friday, close to 13,000 students in the Republic of Ireland are set to take higher level maths in the Leaving Certificate, the state exams for 17-18 year old school leavers. That’s the highest number for two decades, and a 25% increase on last year’s all-time low of 10,400 who registered to sit the higher level exams. Typically, only about 80% of those show up for the higher level paper on the day–last year just 8,200 did–the rest playing safe and switching at the last minute to the ordinary level exams.
In 2011, a little over 55,000 Irish students overall, in a country with a population of 4.6 million, sat the Leaving Certificate in their final days of secondary education. This year, just under 54,000 school leavers are taking the Leaving, as it’s known. I hope they’ve studied hard, and wish them every success!
Mathematics in Education and Industry Conference 2012
The Mathematics in Education and Industry Conference 2012 will take place 28-30 June at the University of Keele.
Edexcel chief says the maths curriculum is failing students
The UK’s national ambition to lead in new high-tech industries is threatened by an alarmingly widespread cultural apathy to maths in this country.
Maths is seen by too many students as something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
…
It is a cultural and an educational problem.
Our experts in education note that young people don’t see maths as relevant to their lives or ambitions.
For the majority of young people, maths is a meaningless subject, with 85 per cent of students quitting it as soon as they are allowed. For too many, maths is just a series of disconnected techniques and formulae. It seems dry and academic.
…
We urgently need a new approach that makes innumeracy as unacceptable as illiteracy.
These are not new or surprising sentiments, except that they come from Rod Bristow who, as head of Pearson UK, describes himself in an opinion piece in the Telegraph numeracy campaign as “responsible for one of the biggest exam boards in Britain”. Edexcel, he says, “sets and marks one million mathematics GCSEs, International GCSEs and A-levels every year”.
Many people see the problems Rod describes as being driven by the assessment system, so what does he propose to do about it? “With other exam boards,” he says, “we are already in discussion with the exams regulator Ofqual about how we can further strengthen maths GCSEs”. He gives the following recommendations:
Where young people don’t gain a C grade first time at GCSE, the education system must offer new courses which encourage them to continue with maths.
We can do this by associating maths more closely with other academic disciplines such as the pure and social sciences.
Universities should make mathematical literacy a clearer requirement for entry to those majority of courses which will use it.
We must show how maths is applied in careers from construction to web design.
He also recommends learning through serious games.
Engaging computer games encourage the ‘learning by doing’ essential to building numeracy skills, and we should make clear the role of maths in producing those games in the first place.
…
If we want our young people to excel and lead the way internationally in maths, we must repurpose our maths teaching, learning and our exams, and use the tools of the future to change the ugly sister culture around mathematics.
Source: Numeracy Campaign: ‘maths curriculum failing to meet the needs of the 21st century’.
E-Learning in Mathematical Subjects
In 2005 I was asked to attend a meeting at Nottingham Trent University with some fellow PhD students. I explained my topic, e-learning in university mathematics, to one student who said, “oh, you should go and talk to Mike in Physics; he’s interested in that sort of thing”. When I found him, it turned out Mike had a little interest in primary school teaching but he said “oh, you should go and talk to Dave downstairs; he’s interested in that sort of thing”.
Feeling like I was on a wild goose chase, I went downstairs and knocked on the relevant door. Dave turned out to be Dr. David Fairhurst, a physicist who had recently moved to Nottingham Trent University. Dave was indeed interested in university education and after a quick chat we agreed there are lots of subjects all trying to deliver mathematical content through electronic means who might benefit from getting together and a seminar series might be useful. I was keen on this; as a PhD student I was encouraged to attend departmental seminars but I hadn’t even managed to understand the titles of any so far.
We booked a room and sent an email around whoever we could think of as an invitation to a general discussion on setting up a seminar series. Thirty or so people turned up and someone suggest Trevor Pull could give the first talk. Over the next three-and-a-bit years we held a total of 25 meetings which were attended by teachers of mathematics from subjects such as mathematics, statistics, physics, chemistry, biosciences, environmental sciences, engineering, computing, social sciences, business and economics, as well as researchers from both computing and education and university learning technology developers. It was really pleasing to meet all these people and see how mathematics is taught in nearly every academic school in the university. We were joined in the organisation by Pete Bradshaw from the School of Education.
In 2006 we had a talk by Steve Maddox about his work supporting two blind physics students at the University of Nottingham. This was excellent and I felt a great sense of loss at having only made this available to the twenty or so people in the room who saw it live. Steve did write his talk up for MSOR Connections, but this only appeared a whole year later because these things take time. I applied for funding from the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (I was a member but this is long before I worked for them) and received £600 towards speakers’ expenses and refreshments at meetings in exchange for recording the talks and making them available online. The Maths, Stats and OR Network (long before I worked for them too) were kind enough to host the large video files on their web server.
For the first two talks I borrowed video cameras from the computing department and recorded and edited these myself. I wrote an article in MSOR Connections about this experience: A quick and easy (rough and ready) method for online video. From 2007 onwards, much to my relief, these were recorded and edited professionally by Chris Shaw of Nottingham Trent University.
Many of the seminar videos cover teaching, learning, assessment and support using specific technologies – wikis, podcasting, Logo, interactive whiteboards, GeoGebra, VLEs and interactive voting systems – a series of talks related to accessibility, particularly access to mathematics by students with visual impairments, and several related to more general pedagogy such as designing effective online questions and relevance of learning styles to e-learning. In the end we recorded fourteen talks as videos. These have been available for a while on the ELMS website and have been downloaded quite a few times (by unique ip addresses: min 30; max 176; mean 51; SD 38; median 37). Now I have transferred the videos also to a YouTube playlist. The website has downloads relating to talks (such as slides) where these are available.
I wrote updates on the availability of new ELMS talks in Mathematics Today (43(3), p. 85; 43(5), p. 164); 45(1), p. 11) and MSOR Connections (7(2), pp. 49-50; 7(4), p. 43; 9(2), pp. 29-30), and a final grant report in Mathematics Today (46(6), pp. 287-288).
ELMS seminars stopped when I moved to full time employment and couldn’t get to Nottingham Trent very often to organise them. I’m really glad for this experience. I met a lot of interesting people doing these seminars and later ran workshops for the MSOR Network’s Accessing MSOR group, staff development seminars for the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nottingham when I worked there and in my current job for the MSOR Network we run seminars and workshops. ELMS was the experience that demystified this process for me and that alone was incredibly useful.
Have you used maths in the news in school?
Later this year I am to give a session at a teachers conference on using maths in the news for enriching school maths lessons.
In my session, I intend to go over some recent maths news. I would also like to give some real examples of teachers having used some news in class.
Samuel Hansen and I keep track of mathematics news and mathematics in the news for our podcast. I am aware that people have written in from time to time to say they have used some bit or another in class but I haven’t recorded these instances.
My plea, then, is this: Whether from the podcast or not, please could you send me your examples of how you’ve used current events in mathematics class for enrichment? I’d like to know what the news story was, what you did and how it worked.
You can leave a message in the comments of this post or send me a message various ways that are listed on the contact page of my website.
Thank you!