Bias in Mathematics Education: Did You See an Elephant?

People in the profession of education — including mathematics education — are prone to exhibit some common modes of reasoning.  We tend to value linearity within learning, compliant students, and evidence which supports our current outlook.  Until we overcome this bias in evidence, there is no hope to make real progress for our students.

A concept used in social science research (which is what education is) is ‘confirmation bias’.  Although the image above refers to ‘facts’, for our purposes the word ‘evidence’ might be a better fit (and I also include the phrase “established scientific research”).  We are so cursed by this bias that we seldom are aware that we are extremely biased.

Some examples:

• At a conference, we select sessions dealing with what we are currently working on … ‘what we want to hear’ becomes a guarantee of what we hear.
• In our department, we discuss issues almost exclusively with colleagues who are known to agree with us on problems and solutions.
• When we read professional material, we seek out mathematics or pedagogy that we are already using.

My concern today is not the ‘other’; the concern is us.  Although it is certainly true that Complete College America (CCA) and the organizations bringing us the “Core Principles” of remediation are suffering from severe confirmation bias, their problem would not be able to impact us … unless we are already in a weakened rhetorical state.

Our theories are often as immature as the mythical blind mind finding out what an elephant is like — we experience 1/100th of the entire domain, and conclude that we have a theory for the entirety.  Something like “students have short attention spans, so never try to have a prolonged exploration of a complex topic” or “yes corequisite remediation works after all” or “showing students I care will result in them learning”.

Not only do we have confirmation bias about the learning process, but we have the same type of bias about mathematics itself.  If you don’t rebel at the phrase “mathematics hasn’t really changed”, you have not been paying attention.  If you expect that mathematics remains stagnant, that is exactly what you will see — in spite of overwhelming evidence which conflicts that point of view.

The phrase “growth mindset” is all the rage. Apparently, this only applies to students.

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