Maths: Five lessons from champion countries in teaching maths – BBC News Africa

The best countries and regions today in mathematics education are Singapore, Macau and Taipei, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Estonia, Switzerland and Canada.

Brazilian students’ score is 65th, below the OECD average. Even the richest 25% in Brazil were below this average.

Another more recent assessment, the Ideb assessment, showed that Brazilian students on average finish high school without enough knowledge to calculate percentages or solve mathematical problems.

Good mathematics teaching is considered essential in today’s world.

“Over the course of a lifetime, a young person needs to refresh, expand and focus their career skills many times, and some skills hold a permanent hold here, Maths is certainly one of those skills,” said Vicky Philips, head Head of NCEE, National Center for Education and Economics (NCEE), in the United States.

NCEE is responsible for the study which breaks down education in high-ranking countries in Pisa. In an interview with BBC News Brazil, Vicky Philips and Tracey Burns, spokespeople for the group, highlighted five characteristics of countries that succeed in mathematics education.

Check it out below, along with a breakdown of what Brazil will get from it:

Full mastery of numeracy is one of the top priorities of countries that are champions in mathematics education. And many of them teach concepts related to calculus, statistics and probability earlier and earlier, from the first years of school.

The curriculum of Korean students, for example, is frequently updated to include courses such as statistical modeling and career-oriented mathematics.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, a new math curriculum has added financial education, the use of data and infographics.

In Canada, the official curriculum provides for the integration of concepts into games and real-life situations.

It varies by age, but includes everything from playing with a ruler to measuring distances to helping children create a budget by predicting what -money they need to save to buy a book or a video game For example.

“In fact, if you ask an (Ontario) preschool student, ‘Did you do math today?’ “He might not say, because he was just playing with water or volume,” says Tracey Burns, NCEE research manager.

“It’s part of the game, but it’s a very intentional part, to strengthen those skills and break down some of the resistance people have to math with a capital M.”

Furthermore, mathematics education is not limited to the mathematics course itself, but permeates the entire school curriculum.

Estonia has created projects to integrate mathematics into other lessons, with detailed strategies that every teacher can use.

In language lessons, for example, students have to convert graphs and tables into text.

In music class, they learn to represent the length of musical notes.

And in physical education classes, they learn to compare sports performance.

In Finland, another country traditionally renowned for education, 11-year-old students were invited to design a small town, choose their profession and become users and citizens of the project.

These are strategies that NCEE experts say help make math meaningful and reduce student rejection and anxiety about numbers and formulas.

“When we integrate (mathematics) with other subjects, and we don’t see mathematics directly from the point of view of the mathematics teacher, and we have students learning mathematics both in the school environment formal and informal opportunities , they all contribute to children seeing mathematics as attractive, interesting and relevant,” assesses Vicky Philips.

A potentially counterintuitive lesson learned from some of the leading mathematics countries is that lessons are very short and have several breaks.

In Estonia and parts of China, for example, lessons in mathematics and other subjects last between 40 and 45 minutes, with a 10 to 15 minute break after each lesson.

For comparison, class hours in Brazil usually last between 40 and 60 minutes.

The drive for shorter lessons, according to Tracey Burns, stems from the idea that students’ attention spans are limited.

“This is about understanding child development and, especially for young children, their attention span – and how do you know if you’re anxious, restless, hungry? It is imperative that you recognize that human beings have a short attention span, and if so. you’re tired, you don’t learn as well when you’re not,” she says.

“It’s not uniform and some countries still have long courses,” emphasizes Burns. “A combination of long and short courses is often the preferred option for many systems. But one of the things that our analysis shows is that it is very bad.”

The main point of countries with the best education systems in the world is teacher appreciation.

The most famous example is in Singapore, where the teacher is in a position of social respect and is well paid. That’s why it goes through strict selection processes.

“In Singapore, degree applicants must have a good academic record and are assessed even on personal qualities, such as passion for teaching,” the NCEE report said.

“Elementary and high school math teachers have two bachelor’s degrees, in mathematical sciences and computational thinking and education. »

In addition, according to the NCEE, teachers in Singapore and other mathematics champion countries benefit from extensive training and mentoring programs, as well as well-designed curricula and clear objectives.

« Ils [les pays] also offers high quality educational materials for teachers,” said Vicky Philips.

“For me, the magic of learning always depends on the relationship between teachers and students. And strengthening that relationship and connection through good materials, ensuring that both have the opportunity to learn what they need to continue to do well in the classroom – All of this is essential.”

It is not easy to bring in educational lessons from places with realities so different from those of Brazil.

Some of those countries that are champions in mathematics have a much stricter teaching tradition, or they live with much less social and economic inequality than we do.

But some solutions can serve as inspiration.

Anna Helena Altenfelder, from the education group Cenpec, believes that Brazil already has good educational qualifications in the National Foundation of Common Programs (BNCC), an official document implemented from 2018 in primary education, which is a mandatory line leader for public and private. school programs in Brazil).

The problem, according to Altenfelder, lies in the uneven way in which this is implemented throughout the country, in the difficulty of controlling daily learning and ensuring flexibility in this schedule, according to the needs of each class.

And something very important: the expert says that there is a lack of working conditions and adequate training for teachers, as many of them graduate from distance courses that are considered precarious and inappropriate.

“I would say that we have the program, we have the base, everything is new. The big challenge is the existing conditions, and we have to [le mettre en œuvre] in school,” said Altenfelder.

“We cannot forget when we think about Brazil, the original training [des enseignants] it is very difficult. I believe that in any of these countries (with a very high level of education) nearly 80% of teachers are distance trained, as is the case here.”