The Scientific Council of National Education has published a warning note in which it highlights the “worrying misunderstanding of numbers and especially fractions” on the part of students entering 6th grade.
“Confusion” and “misunderstanding”. In a warning note published this week, the Scientific Council of National Education (Csen) delivered the results of an annual study showing that French students entering 6th grade still had a “huge deficit” in “understanding numbers, and particularly fractions” .
“When entering 6th grade, most students are unaware of the meaning of the simplest fractions,” noted the members of the Csen “Assessments and Interventions” working group.
The study once again demonstrates “the urgency of energetic action to improve the level of all French students in mathematics”.
Digital line test
For three years, the Department of Evaluation, Foresight and Performance (Depp) has evaluated nearly 6,000 children representative of French students entering 6th grade. To do this, she offers them the number line test which consists of “placing different numbers on a graduated number line”.
According to the results of the survey, only 22% correctly place the fraction 1/2 on a graduated line from 0 to 5, and 6% succeed in placing 3/6. Instead of correctly placing 1/2, students mainly confuse with 1, 1.2, 1.5 or even 2. “The students’ errors reveal a vast confusion between the different types of numbers”, analyzes the alert note .
These errors do not vary excessively depending on the students’ backgrounds. Children in Priority Education Networks (REP) are 85% wrong, compared to 75% for private schools, for example. However, there are gender disparities since among the 20% of the best students in the test, two thirds are boys.
No evolution
Unlike the international Pisa or TIMMS surveys, assessing the level of mathematics of students in OECD countries, this study is annual and highlights the absence of positive development for three years with “practically superimposable” data.
Even more worrying, the Csen affirms that the “understanding deficit continues to be observed throughout schooling”. “Professional high school students have performances close to 6th grade students, and CAP students make even more errors than 6th graders, including with decimal numbers,” says the study.
At the end of last year, the president of the CNRS Antoine Petit considered it “very worrying” the situation of mathematics in Francerelying on the insufficient level of French students in the international Pisa survey and the shortage of teachers in this subject.
Former Minister of National Education, Pap Ndiaye developed a plan in January to strengthen maths teaching. This is why he decided to launch, from this start of the school year, evaluations at the start of CM1, as can be done in CP or CE1.
The objective is “to objectify the difficulties of each student from the start of the school year” to “project with confidence towards college”, explained his successor Gabriel Attal.
2023-09-21 20:04:06
#National #Education #experts #warn #huge #deficit #maths #students #entering #6th #grade
