Can anyone do maths?

Dr Michael Cavanagh displays some maths teaching tools.

What enables one child to excel at maths while another child struggles? Is it natural ability or the way the subject is taught? If the latter, what’s the best way? Welcome to The Maths Wars.

“The Maths Wars are raging,” says Lecturer Dr Michael Cavanagh of the Centre for Research in Mathematics and Science Education (CRIMSE) at Macquarie University. “Maths educators are on one side, and mathematicians on the other, with teachers caught in the middle.

“Some educators say you can only primarily teach maths through understanding, and students have to construct this knowledge for themselves. Some mathematicians adopt a ‘back to basics’ approach: drills practice and breaking concepts down into simple steps. When you master those, they provide the building blocks to take you wherever you want to go, they say.”

John Mighton’s JUMP

CRIMSE staff support a balance between the approaches. They brought best-selling Canadian author John Mighton to Macquarie recently to speak to an enthralled audience of parents, students and teachers.

Mighton’s maths tutoring program, called Junior Undiscovered Maths Prodigies (JUMP), has led to amazing results with students in some of Toronto’s poorest schools. JUMP deliberately challenges “the myth of ability” and tries to build the confidence of students and help them feel they are making progress in maths so they don’t give up.

“Guided discovery is the approach,” says Cavanagh. “Students work individually through a series of graded and sequenced exercises, and as each skill is mastered and patterns discerned, they are motivated to move on to more complex tasks. The emphasis is on encouraging students who have not been successful in the past to believe they can do maths.

“He changed their whole attitude to maths, so that those who had been scared of it suddenly wanted to stay behind and do extra work. That carried over into other areas of learning as well.”

Mighton shifts the responsibility for maths failure from students to teachers.

“It’s always the teacher’s fault if kids don’t understand. You need to assess their work regularly, and if they are having trouble, introduce an intermediate step to help them move to the next level.”

Many of Mighton’s volunteer tutors have themselves struggled with maths. So they simply apply the same principles from their own learning to their teaching.

Peace talks

CRIMSE aims to build collegiality between the warring factions, and between people working at the University and those already teaching maths. It organises seminars on staff members’ research, and also invites in people from a wide network of other universities, and beyond.

“Anecdotally, a lot of maths teachers are resistant to change,” says Cavanagh. “They come from the chalk-and-talk tradition. We say to them: ‘There’s another way’.”

The students sent out from Macquarie to schools are enthusiastic about the new ways of teaching.

“It’s difficult to be an agent of change when you’re fresh out of uni,” says Cavanagh. “But if more school students are going to succeed, this has got to come through new teachers coming in.”

Cavanagh is working for change through his own research. He has recently sent a survey out to 500 schools around the state to find out what they are doing. He is also monitoring teachers to see how they are implementing the new maths syllabus that has just been introduced.

Contact Michael Cavanagh at michael.cavanagh@mq.edu.au. The School of Education website is at www.aces.mq.edu.au/educ_home.asp and the CRIMSE website is at www.aces.mq.edu.au/aces_re_crimse.asp For more information on John Mighton’s JUMP, visit www.jumptutoring.org

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