Mathematics: Foundation for STEM

University of Massachusetts > STEM > Mathematics: Foundation for STEM

Draft guidelines issued by the Department of Education in March 2007 auger major changes in the training of teachers in the mathematics to be taught in primary schools. The recommendations reflect an increasingly technological and globally competitive world. As Commissioner David Driscoll says, "...the new realities demand far higher levels of proficiency in the...STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

Mathematics is foundational to becoming competent in the three other disciplines. The DOE guidelines focus on the elementary level, a crucial and positive step for Massachusetts. With the issuing of the guidelines, elementary candidates, strong in language arts, will also need a comparable level of competence in mathematics. Approved programs for preparing teachers to get a license at the elementary level will need to expand the number and depth of mathematics courses available to their candidates.^¹   To do this, education and mathematics faculty must work collaboratively. The goal is to help teacher candidates transform their knowledge base to teach mathematics to a diverse student body. While higher education institutions continue to grapple with this mandate for pre-service, in-service training must accommodate these new requirements as well.

Put another way, if teachers in the elementary school are uncomfortable with mathematics, they will teach by rote. This makes it difficult to identify alternative ways to solve a problem and to determine a student's competence in mathematics. Certainly, increasing the capacity of students to use mathematics will be difficult. Less focus on procedure and more emphasis on the relevant connections of mathematics to real world problems put mathematics squarely in the center of STEM preparation and advancement.

Mathematical knowledge for teaching: In her studies, Deborah Ball has shown that teachers who score high in "mathematical knowledge for teaching," have students who learn more mathematics over the year than do students of low-scoring teachers. The secret is to know how to apply mathematical knowledge quickly in ways that make sense to students. Rote formulas teach students that mathematics is a subject in which "you're not supposed to think".^² And mathematical knowledge to teach requires a deeper working understanding of mathematics than most elementary school teachers currently have.

A core group of Massachusetts professors of mathematics from the state public universities and colleges support the recommendations of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) that elementary teachers must take at least 9 credits of appropriate mathematical coursework. Course content features numbers and operations, including standard algorithms, "mental mathematics" and nonstandard methods commonly created by students; algebra; geometry; data analysis, statistics and probability. Test questions on the elementary MTEL (the licensure test for teachers) should be consistent with this requirement.

Researcher Liping Ma reports that in contrast to American teachers, Chinese teachers spend considerable time studying the textbooks and manuals that provide information about content, pedagogy, student thinking blocks and doing problems together.^³  Quite a few mathematics teachers go through a cycle of teaching three grades with the chance to experience and revisit the building blocks of mathematics learning.

Challenges ahead: Increasing standards for mathematics learning necessitates boundary crossing, i.e., a constructive collaboration between two disciplines, those who teach teaching candidates and those who teach mathematics. Additionally, teacher preparation institutions will be required to add mathematics courses during a time of shrinking resources. Educator H. Wu says there is a marked irrelevance between what is taught in university mathematics departments and what elementary school teachers need to know.⁴
Mathematics skills need to be learned by teachers both in college and in teacher preparation programs. Catching up once on the job is not easy. Will the new requirements deter teachers from entering the profession? There must be a way to improve the mathematics knowledge of teachers without losing them to teaching. 

² "Teaching Mathematics Requires Special Set of Skills," Oct. 2004, EdWeek

³ L. Ma, Knowing and Teaching Mathematics, 1999

⁴ H. Wu, "Preservice Professional Development of Mathematics Teachers." Unpublished manuscript (1999). Available at www.math.berkeley.edu/~wu.

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