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USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-03-26-math-teach_x.htm
Study's sum: No one way to teach math
March 26, 2003
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - U.S. math teachers give homework more often than their Japanese counterparts, spend more time on review and assign more problems using basic math procedures. But the Japanese do much better in math.
Go figure.
An intriguing new study deconstructing one-hour videotapes of eighth-grade math teachers in seven countries shows that no one way of teaching math does the trick. But the study found that U.S. teachers teach differently from those in Japan, as well as those in Australia, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Switzerland, all of which outperformed the USA in math.
The study of 638 videotaped lessons, most of them from 1999, was released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation.
Education officials caution against using the findings to advocate one method over another. In fact, they say, the videos show that teachers in the two top-performing places, Hong Kong and Japan, use vastly different methods to become the best.
Teachers in Hong Kong get superior results by stressing basic skills and formulas, while those in Japan do well by stressing how math concepts relate to one another.
The findings should put to rest a long-standing debate among educators here as to whether U.S. schools should emphasize skills or concepts, says co-author James Hiebert, an education professor at the University of Delaware. He suggests that schools focus on both.
Hiebert hopes teachers use the findings "to look at their own practice from a fresh perspective."
Among the findings:
- U.S. eighth-grade math teachers on average assign homework in 57% of lessons - less than every other country except Japan, where teachers assign homework in only 36% of lessons.
- U.S. teachers spend much more time reviewing previously taught material than almost any other nation. Fully 53% of lesson time, on average, consists of review. By contrast, teachers in Japan, the highest-scoring country, spend only 24% of time on review.
- Japanese teachers spend 60% of class time introducing new content, nearly three times more than U.S. teachers. (Unlike the other six countries, data in Japan were collected in 1995.)
- Japanese teachers let students struggle with individual problems three times longer than U.S. teachers. On average, they spend 15 minutes per problem, compared with five minutes in the USA.
- Japanese teachers spend far more energy helping students make connections between concepts: 54% of math problems in Japanese classes help students make connections between ideas, while 17% of problems in American classes do.
"Pretty much all the higher-achieving countries do this more than we do," says Paige Kuni, worldwide K-12 education manager for Intel, which has developed an online course for algebra teachers based on the videos.
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