Is Singapore math the solution?
The LA Times has a story this morning about a program that could revolutionize students' success in math. The article tells the story of a Hollywood school that has been using Singapore textbooks to teach math for the past two years and saw its test scores jump 31 points.
How did that happen?It's a question with potentially big implications, because California recently became the first state to include the Singapore series on its list of state-approved elementary math texts. Public schools aren't required to use the books -- there are a number of other, more conventional texts on the state list -- but the state will subsidize the purchase if they do. And being on the list puts an important imprimatur on the books, because California is by far the largest, most influential textbook buyer in the country.
The decision to approve the books could place California ahead of the national curve. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed by President Bush, will issue a report Thursday that is expected to endorse K-8 math reforms that, in many ways, mirror the Singapore curriculum.
But of course, there's a problem.
The story goes on to say that the program is difficult for teachers who don't have a strong math background and the books don't come with teacher cheatsheets.
But there is also an understandable reluctance to rush into a new curriculum before teachers are trained to use it. Complicating that, experts said, is that most American elementary school teachers -- reflecting a generally math-phobic society -- lack a strong foundation in the subject to begin with.The Singapore curriculum "requires a considerable amount of math background on the part of the teachers who are teaching it," said Milgram, "and in the elementary grades, most of our teachers aren't capable of teaching it. . . . It isn't that they can't learn it; it's just that they've never seen it."
This seems like a pretty compelling argument for them to learn:
Singapore is a prosperous, multicultural, multilingual nation of 4.5 million people whose fourth- and eighth-grade students have never scored lower than No. 1 in a widely accepted comparison of global math skills, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. U.S. students score in the middle of the pack.When the U.S. Department of Education commissioned a study in 2005 to find out why, it concluded, in part: "Singapore's textbooks build deep understanding of mathematical concepts through multi-step problems and concrete illustrations that demonstrate how abstract mathematical concepts are used to solve problems from different perspectives."
The Times' story has a good explanation of the difference between Singapore and American texts and how we developed our teaching methods in the first place.
The textbook distributor's Web site has more info about Singapore math and will let you purchase books, if you don't want to wait for the schools to do it. If you want a sneak peek, a Maryland math professor has some sample questions on his site.