Taken very literally, not all students are created equal—especially in their math learning skills, say Texas A&M University researchers who have found that not fully understanding the “equal sign” in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math.
“About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students,” note Robert M. Capraro and Mary Capraro of the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M.
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“The equal sign is pervasive and fundamentally linked to mathematics from kindergarten through upper-level calculus,” Robert M. Capraro says. “The idea of symbols that convey relative meaning, such as the equal sign and “less than” and “greater than” signs, is complex and they serve as a precursor to ideas of variables, which also require the same level of abstract thinking.”The problem is students memorize procedures without fully understanding the mathematics, he notes. [...] One cause of the problem might be the textbooks, the research shows.
The Texas A&M researchers examined textbooks in China and the United States and found “Chinese textbooks provided the best examples for students and that even the best U.S. textbooks, those sponsored by the National Science Foundation, were lacking relational examples about the equal sign.”
An attempt to reach out to children who are victims of a government-run education system: http://tinyurl.com/2c6pyxc
So it’s the textbook’s, not the Teacher’s fault…
Maybe we should start hiring better textbooks and discontinue using out-of-date teachers…
I went to high school in the US and outside of the US. I think the problem is the way we teach math in the US.
In the US, each year or semester you focus 100% of one aspect of math. For example, 1 year of algebra. One semester of trig. 1 semester of stats, 1 semester of calculus, etc.
Overseas, they teach all of the math disciplines together.
Here is why it is better. When you learn them all at the same time, you learn how they relate, and how you can use different methods to solve problems. You can solve a problem using trig, algebra, or basic calculus.
Also, another problem in the US, you forget what you learned. I can’t remember my trig because I spent a year working on stats.
By teaching them together, you get the benefits of cross reinforced math skills, making you much much stonger.
I thought the reason for American kids to suck at math was that the general idea of a male kid getting good math grades rather than good Football scores meant that he’s queer.