St. Albert teachers are giving the province top marks for this week's tweaks to how Albertans teach and learn math.
Education Minister David Eggen announced tougher tests and more support for teachers Tuesday as part of a province-wide method to improve student math scores.
The changes coincided with Tuesday's release of the 2015 Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) results – an international test that tracks math, reading, and science skills in 15-year-olds in 72 nations. Some 2,500 Alberta students took the test.
The PISA study showed that Alberta students ranked second in the world in terms of science performance, third for reading and were well above the Canadian average.
Albertans were less spectacular at math, where they placed 18th overall, compared to Canada's 16th and Quebec's third. Alberta's scores had also seen a statistically significant drop from where they were in 2000.
"We are seeing a downward trend in the PISA mathematics results," Eggen said at a press conference.
"We know we do need to take steps to strengthen mathematics for our students."
Eggen said that the province will restore the written response portion of the Math 30-1 and 30-2 diploma exams as of November 2018. The province dropped that part of those exams in 2009 to save money.
The province will also add a no-calculators-allowed segment to the Grade 9 provincial achievement test in 2018, Eggen said. The province previously announced a similar change to the Grade 6 test.
Eggen also committed about $2 million in bursaries for teachers (up to $2,000 per teacher) to take post-secondary courses on teaching math.
These steps reflect recommendations made by the province's mathematics review panel, the final report of which was released Tuesday. Chaired by MacEwan University math instructor John O'Connor, it had been asked to study why many high-schoolers were struggling with math upon entering post-secondary.
It adds up, say teachers
Kevin Hubick, head of the math department at Sturgeon Composite High, said he was very happy to see the return of written response to the diploma exams. With multiple-choice tests, you can't tell if a student actually understood a concept or just made a lucky guess. With written response, even if the student gets the wrong answer, teachers can still learn a lot about the student based on their work.
"This is another mechanism to tell us what students understand and what they don't."
Math is about the problem-solving process, but students lose sight of this when they don't have to do written response, O'Connor said.
"The emphasis becomes all about the final answer."
Post-secondary teachers have noticed many students struggle to work through math problems as a result. O'Connor said he hoped written response questions would cause teachers to place more emphasis on the process of math in the classroom.
O'Connor said the panel also heard from teachers and students about calculator overuse, and called for part of diploma exams to be conducted without calculators.
"The calculator tends to become a crutch for many students," O'Connor said, which keeps students from developing basic math skills such as order of operations and trigonometry.
"When they do get into algebra, they're just not going to get what the heck is going on."
Calculators and computers have their place, but they're only as good as their operators, said Bill Willette, math department head at Bellerose Composite.
"If we don't have the basics down, computers can tell a lot of lies."
Willette applauded the addition of a no-calculator section to diploma exams, noting that International Baccalaureate tests already have such sections. The new training bursaries should also give teachers new ways to teach math and the extra background they need to show how it applies to real life, he added.
The panel also called on the province to introduce concepts such as fractions and linear relationships earlier in the curriculum to make the high-school learning curve less steep. It also recommended incorporating math into all subjects to change student attitudes towards it.
Visit education.alberta.ca for more on the proposed changes.
