Presentation to the National Mathematics Panel

Aurora, IL, April 20, 2007

By Patrick W. Thompson
Professor of Mathematics Education
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Arizona State University

Mr. Chairman, madam vice-chairman, panel members: Thank you very much for this
opportunity to speak to you about the Panel’s work. I am a researcher in the learning and
teaching of mathematics at all levels of schooling and, a teacher of future and current
mathematics teachers at elementary, secondary, and collegiate levels.

I will speak to five of the Panel’s charges, specifically

1. The critical skills and skill progressions for students to acquire competence in
algebra and readiness for higher levels of mathematics;
3. The processes by which students of various abilities and backgrounds learn
mathematics;
4. Instructional practices, programs, and materials that are effective for improving
mathematics learning;
5. The training, selection, placement, and professional development of teachers of
mathematics in order to enhance students' learning of mathematics;
7. Needs for research in support of mathematics education;

Charges 1 and 7: Critical Skills and Skill Progressions; Research in support of math
education
My first remark addresses Charge 1 and 7, but actually cuts across all of the above. It is
that the Panel has the significant task of responding to a list of charges that take “skills”
as the primary component of mathematics learning when the notion of skill itself is
hardly well defined. Do you take “skill” to mean a child’s ability to perform reliably a
procedure when told to perform that procedure? Or, do you take “skill” to mean a child’s
ability to have developed sufficient knowledge and appropriate flexibility of thought to
solve most problems of a particular genre of problems, even those that might have subtle
and nuanced differences from any the students might have seen? The incommensurability
of different viewpoints will be directly related to the distance between them on this
spectrum. Where the Panel positions itself within these two extremes will affect the
recommendations it issues.

For the same reason, one cannot simply look to “research” to answer the question of what
policies the nation should follow in preparing students for algebra. Which algebra? Push-
button algebra or, as Kaput calls it, the algebra of progressive generalization and
symbolization? The two entail different philosophic and intellectual commitments for
those who embrace them, and they entail different expectations for students’ learning and
teachers’ knowledge at every grade.
Thus, it is incumbent upon the Panel to make clear where it stands with regard to what
students should learn, and to justify that stance according to the pragmatic consequences
that relative stances have regarding students’ learning and preparation for future learning.

I have included several important references that address this tension.

Charges 3 and 4: Processes of Learning; Effective instructional practices

In regard to these I offer an example from a current research project on effective models
for improving secondary mathematics’ teachers instruction. Teachers in the project
simply did not have an image of the kind intense intellectual interchange with students
that we were attempting to help them create, and continued classroom-based efforts
generated only small changes that still looked more like what they had been doing than
what we hoped they would do. So, we created an implementation of Algebra I, in
collaboration with one of the participating teachers, in which we hoped to create
examples of instruction that supported students’ engagement with significant
mathematical ideas and issues. We also hoped that these students would display
proficiency in the algebra that teachers were used to assessing, but display it as a
consequence of understanding ideas well and not because of having memorized a
prescribed procedure.

The students we taught were not in an honors program. Thus, they were students taking
Algebra I in 9th grade. Their computational skills were atrocious. They had no
understanding of fractions. Their experience of mathematics was that teachers showed
them procedures they were supposed to remember until the next test. Their feelings about
mathematics were that it was a dehumanizing experience that no one in their right mind
would choose to experience had they the option not to.

So, our immediate question was what to do about their lack of skills given that our goal
was to have them eventually engage with significant mathematical ideas. Do we re-teach
what they had already not learned? Well, what they needed to know had already been re-
taught several times. Thus, we decided to move on. We began the year with no review,
and we designed instruction by the seat of our pants, always guided by our goal of having
them engage meaningfully with significant mathematical ideas at the same time as being
able to pass the district’s Algebra I final examination (which all students in the district
take).

I will not describe what we did except to say that we focused on ideas of variation,
covariation, rate of change, and functional relationship. Our intent was not to test an
intervention, but rather to create examples to use in our professional development
research of how to deal with ill-prepared students in ways that gave prima fascia
evidence that what students were doing was significant.

The appendices contain examples of the kind of work we have come to expect of
students. Here I will give just one example to make a point.. The example is from a
whole-class activity that occurred within a unit on quadratics. We wanted students to
understand quadratics within a scheme of ways of thinking about polynomial functions:
 − Monomial functions (like f(x) = x44) have predictable and understandable
properties.
− Polynomial functions are just sums of monomial functions
− Quadratic functions are a special case of polynomial functions
− It is possible to change the way a function is defined without affecting the
underlying relationships that the definition expresses (as captured in the
function’s graph). Two definitions are equivalent if one is derivable from
the other, which itself means that a definition’s meaning remains the same
despite changes in the way it appears.
− I emphasize that these students are not honors students

At the end of this activity the teacher showed the students, just for their information, the
definitions of these functions. The definitions were
 x   x
 −  2 − 3  (4 x + 2 )(x + 1)sin  2 
b(x) = − 1,−2 ≤ x ≤ 6.5 (blue graph)
30
x sin(x)
r(x) = , −2 ≤ x ≤ 6.5  (red graph)
3
Half the class asked that she print the function definitions and the graphs so that they
could show their friends and family. I share this not because I offer it as evidence of
effectiveness. Rather, I offer it to illustrate what I mean by engaging students (I mean all
students) in a way that legitimizes, in their worlds, intense engagement with significant
mathematical ideas. I offer this example also to provide some insight into our quest that a
majority of these students, all of whom are on a non-calculus track, to take calculus while
they are still in high school.

I have another point in offering this example. It is to say that, in my opinion, this nation
suffers from a lack of imagination, not a lack of research. And it suffers from lack of
imagination at all levels, especially at the levels of policy and politics.
Charge 5: Training, selection, professional development of teachers
The prior discussion is also pertinent to training, selecting, and providing professional
development for mathematics teachers. However, I would like to raise a matter not in this
list that is important to us at Arizona State University. It is the recruitment and retention
of secondary mathematics teachers (teachers certified with single-subject mathematics
credentials). In Arizona, over the past 5 years, its state universities have produced a
combined average of 55 secondary mathematics teachers per year. One school district in
the Phoenix area is looking to hire 22 secondary mathematics teachers for next year. All
the high minded programs we can imagine are for naught if we have no teachers.

ASU is conducting a study, called the Freshman STEM Improvement Project, that is
yielding some insight into the problem. We asked the question, “Where are we losing
students?” In secondary mathematics education, and to a lesser extent in all disciplines,
we are losing them in calculus. Secondary mathematics education requires 3 semesters of
calculus. Less than 30% of secondary mathematics education students who enroll in
Calculus I complete Calculus III. The attrition rate is about 50% per semester. Clearly, the
problem is an interaction among student preparation, course content, and instructional
practices. We are continuing our study to gain insight into the problem. But the solution
will require imagination, perhaps of the kind I illustrated regarding Algebra I, where we
punted with regard to students’ preparation and focused on how they might recover.

Another possible strategy with regard to increasing the rate at which school students
persist in their mathematical study is to change the nature of teacher preparation so that
we do not pretend to prepare undergraduate students for entry into graduate mathematics
programs. Instead, we might focus the undergraduate preparation of mathematics teachers
on their ability to help students understand the mathematics of middle and secondary
school. As with our example in Algebra I, this might have the salutary effect that it results
simultaneously in better prepared middle and secondary students and better preparation
of secondary-certified mathematics teachers for advanced study of mathematics.