Beyond a Blackboard

 After reading about how Irish and Swedish teachers facilitate more memorisation of facts than in New Zealand, I decided to read a little further about 'rote learning'. I found this article with information about the rote learning of basic facts. While it contains some things I am already familiar with - the fact that knowledge of basic facts such as times tables frees up cognitive load and enables children to solve more complex problems. The level of memorisation required by students is automaticity - they need instant recall. For example, do you know off the top of your head, do you know the 15th letter of the alphabet? What about 4 x 8? 8,16... is not automatic - it needs to be something that comes straight to mind. Otherwise there is still some cognitive load. In order to reach this level of automaticity, it seems like a variety of approaches is needed. Students need to be exposed to basic facts in different contexts, multiple times to commit them to memory. I think this i...

This week I had a go at creating a hands on create activity - a video to teach other students the three times tables. This was at the end of teaching three weeks on the three times table.  Times tables are another aspect of maths that my students are behind on. My advanced year eights could do them in their sleep, but for my 'at' or below students and all of my year sevens, they are a real struggle! I hope by exploring concepts in different contexts my learners will master them!

 I've already investigated the state of mathematics in NZ. We clearly have a problem and it is far wider than that of my own classroom. As Hannah, Clarelle and I are undertaking a collaborative inquiry, I decided to have a look at what other countries have done to increase mathematics on a far broader level. I looked at our latest NZ TIMSS data in an earlier post, so today I thought I'd look at the countries improving their TIMSS results. This report  compares the changes made in three countries improving their TIMSS score to the work that we do in NZ. The three countries were Austria, Ireland and Sweden. In Austria the most obvious difference to me is the way the teaching profession is treated. Austrian teachers complete a masters course within their first five years of teaching. Specialist maths teachers are utilised from year 6 onwards. As such, their pedagogical content knowledge would be higher than many NZ teachers. In Ireland, they have mathematics recovery, similar to ...

 This term I have been gathering data from my learners to determine what challenges need to be addressed. I went into detail on my data collection in previous posts. One piece of data that was most striking straight away was my students lack of knowledge in fractions. At the end of term 1, I glossed the majority of my class. There was a group of 7 students whose knowledge in fractions was severely lacking in comparison with their ability to add or multiply. These students were achieving scores around stage 6 in add/sub and mult/div, but stage 2-4 in ratio and proportion. These students could multiply and divide by 4, but could not find 1/4 of 20. There are a multitude of studies that support the fact that fractions are a common weakness for primary school students, for several reasons  ( Behr et al., 1983 ;  Moss and Case, 1999 ;  Grégoire and Meert, 2005 ;  Charalambous and Pitta-Pantazi, 2007 ). From my in class observations, I can see that these students also...

Are NZ teachers really failing our students in maths? In 2020, Year 9 students scores in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) fell by the largest margins since the study began in 1994. There is a large gap in the achievement of students from high vs low socioeconomic backgrounds and girls are outperforming boys. However, it also found that the students home environment had the biggest impact on their achievement across all countries.   In the holidays, I spent two weeks at a daycare with a 'high decile' rating whose roll consisted largely of south east asian students and then pakeha (groups who have been found to have the highest achievement in mathematics).  The first thing I noticed was the students language skills. The three year olds were using phrases and full sentences, asking questions and speaking enough that you could pick up on their thought processes and understanding of the activity they were engaging with. They were excited to lea...