As students get older, scores in subject drop
August 2, 2004
Math teachers see numbers in terms of percentages and ratios.
So in a sense, many Greeley-Evans School District 6 math instructors had reason to celebrate the release of Colorado Student Assessment Program scores Monday.
The CSAP is designed to show the number of students who meet state standards for math, reading, writing and science.
District 6 showed modest overall improvement in those subjects compared to last year.
Superintendent Tony Pariso attributes the gains to extra effort from teachers and principals.
“They are working their tails off,” he said.
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They also appear to be working their calculators, rulers and protractors.
The 2004 CSAP results show that the average District 6 math-proficiency score was higher than last year. And the percentage of 10th-graders who met the standards inched closer to the state average.
But math teachers aren’t popping any corks.
That’s because math-proficiency scores remained dismal across Weld County and the state.
Only 15 percent of District 6 10th-graders meet state math standards, compared to 27 percent statewide.
Low math scores are no surprise to Cathy Seeley, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. That’s why Seeley and the 100,000 members of the math council are rewriting the formula for math education nationwide.
Poor math performance is also a problem that District 6 instructors are determined to solve, beginning this fall.
A SOLID FOUNDATION
If math scores in District 6 were
expressed as a word problem, it would go something like this: Jenny leaves fifth grade proficient in math like 47 percent of her classmates. By 10th grade, only 15 percent of her peers meet Colorado math standards. If math scores decrease at the same rate between fifth and 10th grade, what percentage of Jenny’s peers meet state standards in seventh grade?
The reality is that math scores don’t decline at exactly the same rate between fifth and 10th grade. But they do get consistently lower as students age.
For instance, 25 percent of District 6 seventh-graders met or exceeded state math standards in 2004 compared to only 15 percent of 10th graders.
Math teachers have spent years calculating why this decline happens.
Lyndsay Hammer is part of the equation.
Lyndsay, a 16-year-old Greeley West student entering her senior year, said math is fun when she understands it.
But one bad year can make math confusing for years to come.
Lyndsay’s bad year was in junior high, when her math teacher was so boring that paying attention was tougher than remembering the polygon formula.
Lucky for Lyndsay, her engineer dad was able to help. Other students who stumble early on math never catch up, teachers say.
“Math more than any other subject builds on skills,” Pariso said. “If you can’t do division, you certainly can’t do algebra.”
That concept is the thrust of a program District 6 math teachers will start in grades six through 12 this fall and kindergarten through fifth by fall of next year.
Here’s how it works: Teachers create a master list of skills students need for high-level math in secondary school.
Using that list, teachers focus on a set of skills each year, such as working with fractions and exponents, instead of picking and choosing from a broad curriculum.
The problem today, according to Meeker Elementary Principal Wes Tuttle, is that math teachers tackle too many topics instead of hitting hard and deep on a few important concepts. Tuttle is a former District 6 math coordinator.
“We’re trying to teach everything, and we’re not doing a good job with any of it,” Tuttle said.
District 6 teachers also plan to continue showing students such as Staci Stillman why math is relevant.
Staci, a 16-year-old Greeley West student who will be a senior this year, lost her appetite for math when it became clear that her career path would probably not wonder in the way of calculus or trigonometry.
“I was going to go on to trig and calc but then I thought, ‘I want to be a psychologist; there would be nothing in my career where I would need it,'” Staci said.
Seeley disagrees — a psychologist might use math to analyze studies and spot trends in treatment or diagnoses.
Even so, Staci and many of her peers present one of the biggest challenges that math teachers face: Showing how seemingly esoteric operations apply to everyday life.
It’s not enough to teach the formula for checking congruency in a rectangle. You have to show that such a skill is necessary for setting up a baseball diamond, Tuttle said.
Tuttle, a former eighth grade math teacher, hung a chart in his classroom that showed how math is used in careers such as nursing, art and carpentry.
Messages from outside the classroom are also important.
That means changing the I-stink-at-math-but-so-what attitude among parents and other adults.
“If someone can’t read, society jumps to help them,” Tuttle said. “But if someone can’t balance their checkbook, we just laugh at that.”