First of all, I was surprised that the close relationship between global issues and change in math education in North America. Although the progressive reform seems to start with a spontaneous debate, it was driven by global factors such as WWI and international immigrants as well. Moreover, other countries’ achievements played an important part in the rest two math education movements. The new math is mainly caused by the competitions from the Soviet Union and the big concern and anxiety in the math wars came from the better math outcomes in other countries regarding the TIMSS ranking.
However, I think this kind of ranking is not accurate and all it does is creating stereotypes. This leads to my second stop which is my stand in the ongoing math wars — I believe that the assessment approach is the key. Different methods of assessment can describe the same student with very different performance results. In the current math teaching process, most teachers still mainly focus on submissive assessments, yet their teaching beliefs are actually progressive. It is impossible for a teacher to evaluate students’ development in mathematical thinkings based on the selection of multiple choices. Thus, I think applying more formative assessments could be more important than changing math curricula and teaching methods.
In addition, I noticed that parents’ role in math learning was mentioned several times in the article. I feel strongly related to this idea. As I talked about in my previous blog, my father is my favourite math teacher. However, when I got into higher grades, sometimes he could not assist me since the content was different from what he learned. At that time, I gained a lot of help from my peers. According to this personal experience, I think to encourage peer interactions in learning could be a good strategy in math teaching.
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