Do your students *really* know the material?

A new Tools for Practice helps students realize what they actually learned

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Math in the news

I’ve got two math stories out this week, which I discussed a little in my Wednesday short letter.

My story for The Grade is about how journalists cover math—I think it’s important that we in the media get beyond the sexy topics of math anxiety, “engagement,” and who is taking algebra in 8th grade and start looking at who has mastery over foundational skills and why.

Here’s what JUMP Math founder John Mighton told me about how journalists should cover math:

“Journalists often mistake the surface elements like ‘engagement’ with actual learning,” says mathematician and JUMP math founder John Mighton. They’ve been told things that aren’t supported by research, like memorizing math facts is harmful or that if students are engaged and having fun with “real world” problems, they are learning. But “superficial engagement is momentary,” Mighton notes, and “deep engagement comes from mastery.”

Read the whole story on how the media should cover math here.

I also wrote about number sense for The Hechinger Report. A flexibility with and understanding of numbers should be directly taught in early childhood and early elementary school, experts say, in the way phonics needs to be taught in order to read. The vast majority of kids who struggle in math, 80-90%, are missing a fundamental understanding of how numbers work, how they’re connected and related to each other.

Here’s something that I hadn’t really thought about: researchers say that early childhood and early elementary students should be spending way more time with numbers than they currently do. Numbers are only considered during “math time,” and that may not be enough.

Researcher Nancy Jordan: “Often I’ll go into classrooms with literacy stuff all over the walls, but nothing in terms of number…In the early grades, there are so many ways to build number sense outside of instructional time as well — playing games, number lines in the classroom. Teachers can think of other ways to build these informal understandings of math and relate them to formal understanding.”

Read the whole story on number sense here.

What’s next at The Bell Ringer

Lightning round with Amanda VanDerHeyden: submit your questions!

I’ll be interviewing researcher Amanda VanDerHeyden next week for the next installment of Interview with an Expert. We will be talking about the Instructional Hierarchy, and how teachers can use this well-researched structure to better design their instruction.

VanDerHeyden’s career has focused on gold-standard, experimental math research. She is a former standing panel member for the Institute of Education Studies at the U.S. Department of Education, and she’s founder of a whole-class, evidence-based math intervention called SpringMath.

All subscribers are welcome to submit questions for Amanda, and we will try to answer as many as we can. You can email your question to me (put “VanDerHeyden” in the subject line), or put your question into the Substack chat. I’ll be checking both—please include your first name and where you’re from!

* Email your question

* Submit question via chat

You can also just leave your question in the comment section!

Tools for Practice: Brain, Book, Buddy

Blake Harvard, psychology teacher and author of “Do I Have Your Attention?” said students are often overconfident of what they really know about the material they’re learning. I recently interviewed Harvard about this and his new book, you can read more about it here.

Today Harvard gives us a 101 on how he applies the research on checking for understanding + retrieval practice to help students get a “more honest assessment” of what they know and what they need to study—and how that looks in his classroom.

He calls it “Brain, Book, Buddy.”

The Problem