Maths problems do not add up

Australia’s rancorous education debate, the literacy wars and the history wars are well developed if unresolved, unfortunately. Less is said about mathematics, although the subject probably gives more students grief. Anxious parents who pay tutors anything from $40 to $150 an hour – depending on an instructor’s qualifications, experience and ability to demystify the subject – know how problematic it can be. Australian students’ decline in maths in international testing is well known. The average 15-year-old student who sat the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment test, Rebecca Urban writes in Inquirer, was more than a full year behind in maths compared with 2003. The decline in the number of students taking advanced maths is also problematic – it holds the nation back in engineering and technology, and reinforces the shortage of specialist maths teachers. The revision of the national curriculum, open for public comment until July 8, should be a circuit breaker. But educators are divided, with some fearing the new approach will only reinforce problems.

Until the 1980s, students were usually taught maths with an emphasis on memorisation and practice so skills and knowledge became automatic – think times tables. More recently, progressive methods have emphasised inquiry-style learning. As the theory goes, learning is more valuable when it is driven by students rather than imposed. The new maths curriculum, Urban writes, was co-designed by the firm of US educational futurist Charles Fadel, an advocate of the 21st-century skills-over-knowledge movement. It has therefore elevated the role of problem solving.

Maths teachers’ associations and related professional bodies insist that teaching maths content is no longer sufficient and that learning via problem solving and inquiry is the way of the future. Empirical evidence, however, links that approach with inferior student outcomes. As several experienced maths teachers told Urban, some students relish problem solving. But before they reach that point, the teachers said, they needed to know basic facts, formulas and other fundamentals well. Achieving that would involve explicit instruction by teachers before students were able to rely more on themselves. Nor should our new curriculum short-change students by postponing challenges that students in nations such as Singapore tackle in primary school. Our students deserve to be taught the tools they need to excel. Rows over phonics in teaching reading have dragged on too long. We cannot afford to waste decades more arguing while students miss out on maths knowledge they need.