Mathematical Literacy and Equity

I just finished watching a talk given by my friend Uri Treisman at the NCTM conference, in which Uri presents some great sets of data and a wise viewpoint on the theme of equity.  Seemingly unrelated, I am often asked “what is so different about that Math Lit course?”

Most of the data I have seen suggests that the traditional developmental math curriculum tends to reinforce existing achievement gaps.  Students who had done well overall, but not in math, pass our courses.  Students who have struggled pass at a much lower rate.  Access is not the same as equity.  In particular, minority students tend to have much lower pass rates than majority Caucasian students.

In Uri’s talk, he tells the story of how Boeing became successful at building airplanes … by designing ‘fault-proof’ planes, where one failure would not cause a catastrophic event.  Uri calls us to design fault-proof educational systems to avoid catastrophic events for our students.

A Math Lit class is one attempt at a fault-proof course.   In the traditional curriculum, there is a tendency for students to be defeated by mathematical ideas that they did not understand.  The Math Lit approach for this problem is to avoid catastrophic failure; within each class, we identify students who did not understand enough to succeed and provide an opportunity to learn.  We focus on the more important mathematics and cover a few less topics; however, the course provides more hope that all students can succeed regardless of their prior mathematics.

A central part of this fault-proof system is the instructor ‘assessing’ every student’s understanding in every class.  Work shown and dialogue reveal a much richer map of knowledge than can ever be achieved by technology such as homework systems.  Online platforms such as My Lab, Connect Math, and Web Assign play a role for students; however, they are not fault-proof — I believe that they tend to be even more ‘reinforcing existing achievement gaps’ than the basic traditional curriculum.

In general, the New Life model looks at the problem of equity by designing a curriculum that provides powerful opportunities to learn.  Our goal is to create a system where hard work will result in progress for every student.  Because equity is so important, we in the New Life project base our work on the value of instructors working with students on important mathematics in prolonged and intense ways.  No student should be blocked from success by the accidents of their prior learning experiences; no student should be blocked from considering STEM fields by faults in their mathematical knowledge.

If you’d like to see the talk by Uri Treisman, it is available on the Dana Center web site at http://www.utdanacenter.org/its-50-of-the-best-minutes-you-can-spend-to-get-a-detailed-examination-of-educational-inequality-in-america-uri-treismans-equity-address-at-the-nctm-annual-conference/

I hope that you will work with us to build a mathematics curriculum that avoids catastrophic failure, where every student can succeed in learning important mathematics.

 http://www.utdanacenter.org/its-50-of-the-best-minutes-you-can-spend-to-get-a-detailed-examination-of-educational-inequality-in-america-uri-treismans-equity-address-at-the-nctm-annual-conference/

2 Comments

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  By Sue Jones, June 4, 2013 @ 11:18 am

  I loved his description of “fault-tolerant” education.

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  By Sue Jones, June 5, 2013 @ 9:10 am

  Oh, and his other pithy quote: ““If we’re going to work on raising the level of our international competitiveness through education, it’s not going to happen by improving the educational outcomes of people in the top quartile of income.”
  More directed at the political swamplands of K-12 and high stakes testing, he quoted Donald T. Campbell about how when measurements of stuff we want to change get really important, they are most prone to corruption (as the appearance of change gets more important than actual change). I think this is an issue we have to be aware of with dev ed, especially math, when we start dreaming up boot camp test prep sessions as opposed to, say, Math Literacy…

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