Reading and Math Wars in Education

This week's article summary is The Science of Reading Swept Reforms into Classrooms: What About Math?

As you’ll see from the article, the math wars are just as important as the reading wars, yet for various reasons math continues to get less attention than reading. One reason is because while we all consider ourselves readers, many of us don’t see ourselves as mathematicians.

The reading wars center on the debate between the whole-language approach (kids will naturally learn to read when surrounded by a literature-rich home and school) versus systematic, explicit phonics lessons.

As we now know, while the research has always supported the need for direct phonics instruction, it’s only been over the past few years that whole language has lost the war—although there are still a few hold-out teachers who cling to how they’ve always taught reading.

While the reading wars appears to be over, it doesn’t mean there’s no place for a literature-rich environment. Reading to your kids in the classroom and at home helps excite them about reading, stimulate their imagination, and become more empathetic. Still, the vast majority of kids need explicit instruction to build the foundational skills and concepts to read on their own.

The math wars similarly center on those who believe procedural fluency is paramount versus those who consider conceptual understanding most critical.

Procedural fluency has traditionally been measured via timed assessments to ensure the math facts are stored in long-term memory and can be quickly recalled, thus allowing our short-term, working memory more space to handle higher-level math concepts.

The challenge for the math wars is both sides of the argument have some merit: kids need both procedural fluency and conceptual understanding.

Over the past few years Trinity has seemingly found the magic formula under the premise that procedural fluency emanates from conceptual understanding.

At admissions open houses, I often tell parents that at Trinity the three keys math concepts we develop are number operations, number flexibility, and algebraic reasoning.

Math is a language and much like reading, explicit instruction is needed. But as the article explains, viewing math solely through an algorithmic lens (which is how many schools still teach math) won’t help children develop a foundational conceptual understanding of math. Students need to be able to solve math problems and demonstrate their answers in multiple ways. In this way they begin to truly understanding the ‘why’ of math, not just the ’how.’

The math wars are still being fought in schools across the country, yet Trinity has taken the best of both sides and is making a huge difference in the lives of our students!

Joe

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For much of her teaching career, Carrie Stark relied on math games to engage her students, assuming they would pick up concepts like multiplication by seeing them in action. The kids had fun, but the lessons never stuck.

A few years ago she shifted her approach, turning to more direct explanation after finding a website on a set of evidence-based practices known as the science of math.

“I could see how the game related to multiplication, but the kids weren’t making those connections,” said Stark, a math teacher in Kansas City. “You have to explicitly teach the content.”

As American schools work to turn around math scores that plunged during the pandemic, some researchers are pushing for more attention to a set of research-based practices for teaching math. The movement has passionate backers, but is still in its infancy, especially compared with the phonics-based science of reading that has inspired changes in how classrooms across the country approach literacy.

“I don’t think the movement has caught on yet. I think it’s an idea,” said Matthew Burns, an education professor at the University of Florida who was among researchers who helped create a Science of Math website as a resource for teachers.

There’s a debate over which evidence-based practices belong under the banner of the science of math, but researchers agree on some core ideas.

The foremost principle: Math instruction must be systematic and explicit. Teachers need to give clear and precise instructions and introduce new concepts in small chunks while building on older concepts. This guidance contrasts with exploratory or inquiry-based models of education, where students explore and discover concepts on their own, with the teacher nudging them along.

In some ways, the best practices for math parallel the science of reading, which emphasizes detailed, explicit instruction in phonics, instead of letting kids guess how to read a word based on pictures or context clues.

Margie Howells, an elementary math teacher in Wheeling, West Virginia, first went researching best practices because there weren’t as many resources for dyscalculia, a math learning disability, as there were for dyslexia. After reading about the science of math movement, she became more explicit about things that she assumed students understood, like how the horizontal line in a fraction means the same thing as a division sign.

“I’m doing a lot more instruction in vocabulary and symbol explanations so that the students have that built-in understanding,” said Howells.

Some elements of math instruction emphasize big-picture concepts. Others involve learning how to do calculations. Over the decades, clashes between schools of thought favoring one or another have been labeled the “math wars.” A key principle of the science of math movement is that both are important, and teachers need to foster procedural as well as conceptual understanding.

When Stark demonstrates a long division problem, she writes out the steps for calculating the answer while students use a chart or blocks to understand the problem conceptually.

For one fifth grader who was struggling with fractions, she explicitly re-taught equivalent fractions from third grade — why two-fourths are the same as one-half, for instance. He had been working with her for three years, but this was the first time she heard him say, “I totally get it now!”

Still, skeptics of the science of math question the emphasis placed on learning algorithms, the step-by-step procedures for calculation. Proponents say they are necessary along with memorization of math facts (basic operations like 3×5 or 7+9) and regular timed practice — approaches often associated with mind-numbing drills and worksheets.

Math is “a creative, artistic, playful, reasoning-rich activity. And it’s very different than algorithms,” said Nick Wasserman, a professor of math education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Supporters argue mastering math facts unlocks creative problem-solving by freeing up working memory — and that inquiry, creativity and collaboration are still all crucial to student success.

“When we have this dichotomy, it creates an unnecessary divide and it creates a dangerous divide,” said Elizabeth Hughes, an education professor at Penn State and a leader in the science of math movement. People feel the need to choose sides between “Team Algorithms” and “Team Exploratory,” but “we really need both.”

Best practices are one thing. But some disagree such a thing as a “science of math” exists in the way it does for reading. There just isn’t the same volume of research, education researcher Tom Loveless said.