California's math framework lacks research to justify its progressive agenda
Categories: US Education News
The California State Department of Education has released a new draft of its curriculum framework for K-12 mathematics. While it is notably improved regarding opportunities for advanced work, the document is still woefully laden with dogma about politics and about how to teach math.
The framework promotes only the progressive-education approach to teaching math, calling it “student-led” instruction, “active learning,” “active inquiry,” and “collaborative” instruction. But evidence from the 1950s through recent times shows that this way of teaching math is ineffective. That evidence comes from scrutinizing carefully designed studies featuring randomized control and what are called quasi-experiments, which approximate the effect of a randomized assignment of students to different groups.
Quasi-experiments look at cases, for example, where two adjoining districts with similar populations or two adjoining similar schools adopt different policies. Both sorts of studies are much stronger evidence than the case studies that progressive educators rely on.
In the spring 2012 issue of American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, top educational psychologists Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller summarized “decades of research” that “clearly demonstrates” that for almost all students, “direct, explicit instruction” is “more effective” than inquiry-based progressive education in math.
Is it true that student struggle is such a critical component of learning that it should be singled out and treated as primary? The framework offers a variety of cherry-picked citations supporting this idea. Yet, it carefully avoids mentioning that research warns against excessive struggle as time-wasting and discouraging, often leaving students with incorrect understanding.
In the absence of such cautions, teachers are likely to walk away convinced that the more they let their students struggle—and struggle is common with the inquiry-based pedagogy promoted by the framework—the more they will learn. This is like saying a child should be tossed in the water rather than taught to swim.
If the framework writers had wanted solid evidence, they would have relied on the final report and subgroup reports of the 2008 federal National Mathematics Advisory Panel. They would have made even more use of the federal Institute of Education Sciences practice guides, which are designed for teachers and curriculum writers. Instead, the framework’s writers pretend this high-quality evidence doesn’t even exist.