Putting the "M" in STEM
A country obsessed with STEM should care more about math achievement in schools
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A story I wrote for The 74, “Reading Supports Abound in Schools, But Effective Math Help Much Harder to Find,” published last week. It looks at how most American schools have some kind of help in place for struggling readers, even if that help is sometimes not very effective. But far fewer schools have similar supports in place for math.
This is an interesting and newsworthy development, considering the majority of American students—about 65%—are considered “struggling” in math according to experts, meaning they scored either “basic” or “below basic” on the Nation’s Report Card 2022 assessment. National test scores have been sinking and achievement gaps widening for more than a decade, far before the pandemic. But in my reporting, a closer look reveals that only seven states even require schools to help students who struggle with math. The vast majority of schools have an “intervention” system in place for students who struggle with reading, yet only 47% have one in math.
“It is typical that most schools screen students in reading and have pretty good intervention systems set up in reading, but that isn’t the case in math,” University of Texas, Austin professor Sarah Powell told me.
An organized system of intervention to get students back on track, research shows, can help nearly all students improve math skills, whether it’s students being pulled out of class for small group or one-on-one help, or whole-class help. Researcher Brian Poncy’s experiments at Oklahoma State University, for example, have tested students of all intellectual abilities, including students with learning disabilities, and found they were able to learn math. What mattered was the size and intensity of the “dose.” While some students need higher doses of math than others to gain skill, nearly all can learn.
What my reporting reveals is that students who don’t pick up on math naturally often don’t have a clear path to get better at it within their school. And since math is cumulative—skills build upon each other relentlessly—kids who fall off the math learning track, without significant help, will have a hard time getting back on.
Lots of educators and experts have told me that math often gets second place in schools to reading, which makes sense. But there are good reasons to care about it. As I wrote in The 74 story, “It predicts overall academic achievement and college readiness, shapes higher career aspirations and perhaps even higher future earnings—not to mention a pathway to lucrative STEM careers.”
It’s that last one that really confuses me. Math is integral to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) learning and future careers, and we are a country that is by all measures obsessed with STEM education.
A nation obsessed with STEM
Over the last several decades, the U.S. has invested billions in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education and career opportunities, for good reason: STEM is the fastest growing sector of the economy. The Biden administration has invested 1.2 billion, following the historic 3 billion from the Obama years; the Gates Foundation, nearly 2 billion; and still more billions coming from corporations with an interest in developing more STEM talent. The investment goes lots of different places, from classrooms to programs to teacher training and more. Millions are earmarked for special programs attracting groups of students like girls, students of color, and low-income kids to STEM.
Yet decades of investment haven’t produced significant results. Less than 40% of college students who begin school in a STEM major stick with it until graduation. Chronic teacher shortages in STEM subjects are ongoing. And while 35 million American jobs are in STEM fields, international students, which make up only 5% of degree-seeking students in the U.S., make up half of American college graduates in STEM fields, and make up a quarter of all workers in STEM fields.
The National Math and Science Foundation writes, “With the rise of STEM industries, a solid foundation in math and science is essential for many high-paying jobs. Students need this foundation to be included in the job market.”
A lack of organized, evidence-based supports for math students speaks to something much larger that I don’t think is getting addressed: many American students can’t fulfill their STEM dreams due to lack of math skill. And the support—the right teaching, curricular materials, an organized plan—to help students gain that skill is hard to find.
Evidence exists for better math teaching, but many classrooms don’t use it
In some of my previous math reporting, I found that similar to reading, there is an evidence base for helping students learn math. Though it looks different from the science of reading, and isn’t quite as robust, it still exists. But schools, school leaders and teachers may not be aware of it.
Many of the most popular and widespread teaching methods for math are missing key evidence that they increase math learning. As mentioned in a previous post, research indicates that teachers often believe they are using evidence-backed practices, but often those practices came from observational studies, not research evidence.
One important example is the concept of “productive struggle” seen in many American math classrooms. Productive struggle involves giving students a new kind of problem to solve, one they have no experience with, with minimal teacher guidance on how to solve it. The idea is that students will grapple with this unknown problem and figure out an answer on their own, leading to a deeper or perhaps more creative understanding than if the teacher had shown them how to solve it from the start.
Yet researchers show that productive struggle has no significant evidence behind it as a valuable learning tool. A growing body of scientific evidence points to the opposite: when tested, teaching methods in which the teacher explicitly shows students how to work a new kind of problem, then carefully guides them through examples where they can catch and correct mistakes, produce better results for students.
It’s not that popular methods like productive struggle or inquiry-based learning are necessarily bad, researcher Kati Maki told me for an Edutopia story; it’s that classrooms employ them too soon, before students have acquired a base level of skill. As researchers explain here: “The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide ‘internal’ guidance.” If 65% of students are performing at basic or below basic levels in math, they most likely do not have sufficient prior knowledge.
I include this example (and there are several others) to highlight one of the reasons so many students may be struggling with math: while it’s true that many schools don’t have organized systems for helping struggling math students, it’s also true that fewer students might fall into the struggling bucket altogether if they were consistently provided stronger, evidence-based math classes, year after year.
Other challenges with math learning persist: fewer schools have math coaches and math specialists to support teachers and students, compared to reading. Teachers themselves, especially in elementary grades, often have low confidence in their own math skill that affects how they teach and how much time they spend teaching math. And many schools find available math curriculum lacking or incomplete; teachers are spending extra hours creating their own materials.
Stronger math education is vital for more students to think of a STEM career as an option. Getting students math help and providing evidence-based instruction are just a couple of key pieces of the puzzle.
Struggling students need math help at school—tutoring at places like Kumon or Mathnasium can cost up to $300-400 a month, and are only available to parents with the time and the means. Implementing evidence-based practices might keep more students out of intensive help in the first place, and puts them in a much better position to choose engineering or designing video games in the future, if they desire.
Billions of dollars are spent to encourage kids to get interested in STEM. How many more STEM students might we have if we could get kids on track in math?