Source: Radio New Zealand
Education Minister Erica Stanford. RNZ / Mark Papalii
The government is extending a maths teaching programme after a pilot showed it improved struggling learners’ maths knowledge at twice the rate of peers who had regular teaching.
The maths acceleration programme developed by the Education Ministry ran with nearly 1400 Year 7 and 8 students in more than 100 schools earlier this year for 12 weeks.
A ministry report said nearly 600 students had small-group tutoring four times a week, 200 had online exercises, nearly 300 had a mix of online and personal tutoring, and a control group of nearly 300 had regular lessons using new maths resources.
The lessons were focused on four areas of maths – basic facts including multiplication and division, place value, rational number, and interpreting and solving problems involving number.
The students were then tested on those four areas using the e-asTTle test used by many schools.
Students in the control group improved their scores by 26 points, which was at the low-end of the 25-30 point average progress expected for Y7-8 students in a year.
But students in the tutoring group improved by 54 points.
“This shows progress in these key aspects of Maths of approximately 2 years growth across the 12-week intervention,” the report said.
Those in the hybrid group improved 40 points, and those in the online group improved 33 points.
“Analysis showed that demographic and socio-economic variables (such as gender, school EQI, and ethnicity), did not substantially influence the relative effectiveness of the interventions,” the report said.
“This finding suggests a good degree of equity in the outcomes, with students from a range of backgrounds achieving similar gains in maths achievement. In other words, the tutoring programmes appeared to provide equitable benefits across different ethnic and socio-economic groups, supporting the goal of reducing educational disparities.”
The report said the ministry’s data analysts had reviewed the trial design and analysis, and confirmed it was robust.
Education Minister Erica Stanford said the programme was being rolled out nationwide, with around 13,000 students set to take part from the start of next year.
She said all schools that asked to be part of the programme had been accepted.
Stanford said the programme was proof of the government’s commitment to raising children’s achievement and of the efficacy of the new maths curriculum.
Massey University maths education professor Jodie Hunter said the results needed to be put into context.
She told RNZ children could not be said to have made a full year’s progress unless they had been tested against the entire maths curriculum.
“What we’re missing here is what about algebra, what about geometry, what about measurement, what about probability, what about statistics. So you can’t say that children have made one to two years progress if you’re only looking at one very small part of mathematics,” she said.
Hunter said teachers would not spend an entire year teaching one topic, so a year’s progress on a topic might be made in just a few weeks.
She said it was also not clear whether the students who were behind in their maths learning had caught up with their peers.
Hunter said the e-asTTle test was designed for use with the previous curriculum, so it was not clear if the students’ progress was measured against the new curriculum introduced this year.
She said high-performing school systems focused their spending on raising the maths teaching ability of all teachers who taught the subject, rather than on one-off interventions.
Hunter said the government had so far offered teachers two to four days of professional learning which was not sufficient to make changes in classrooms.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand