Maths That Matters
We hear a lot about high stakes testing these days, but it has been many years since I’ve been asked to clear such a hurdle. So I thought I might try a few questions, and where better to look for something to test-drive than The OECD’s PISA tests? After all, those tests form the basis for international comparisons of educational success.
As it happens, there’s a user friendly set of sample questions at www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/ and I thought I’d head out of my comfort zone and try the Mathematics ones as a test case. I haven’t formally studied mathematics since I left school, so this was high risk. Thankfully I did OK, very well in fact, even at the higher levels. But how could this be? Maybe their sample questions were skewed?
In fact, I thought the questions were good. They were rooted in the real world and appeared to assess understandings that were of enduring significance and which were transferable, for the most part, to a range of different contexts. I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to use strategies I was used to applying in my daily life. It all made sense.
So, why am I dismayed? Well, the PISA test questions and my recent recollection of school-based maths examinations for 15 year olds didn’t seem to share much in common. In fact, I could confidently state that I wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing the average mid-level school-based maths test in 2019. They seem full of equations, formulae and symbols that look vaguely familiar to my long term memory, but for which I lack the detail needed to comprehend them 45 years on. Frankly, they’re mostly gobbledygook to me now.
Yet, here, at least on the PISA samples I saw, there wasn’t a quadratic equation in sight. I could answer these questions as a normal literate and numerate human being! How weird is that!
All of this starts to make me wonder. While I don’t profess to know the answers to the following questions, I think they’re worth asking. At the very least, they are worth a quick double check.
While everyone agrees that numeracy matters, are we actually teaching numeracy in our schools, or are we teaching something different but related – called mathematics. And is the latter as important as the former to the general public – even in the modern STEM filled world?
Do we risk damaging the development of numeracy by confusing it with the sifting and sorting of students based on tertiary education’s definition of intellectual rigour, and for which mathematics has become the designated sieve – at the expense of numeracy?
If mathematics were no longer the sieve, could the maths curriculum link more flexibly with other areas of the curriculum and play its part in building the connections that grow transferable knowledge?
I would never want to stop mathematicians from following their passion or encouraging capable and enthusiastic maths students from stretching their potential, but this is not a binary choice. Perhaps we should look again at what maths might mean in schools and embrace numeracy for all instead. And the PISA results might improve!
Noel Thomas