Mathematics education in the United States puts far too much emphasis on memorization, says Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler. And that ultimately leads students to both misunderstand and dislike math as a subject.
In a recent Hechinger Report commentary, Boaler wrote that "we continue to value the faster memorizers over those who think slowly, deeply, and creatively," and that this has "produced a generation of students who are procedurally competent but cannot think their way out of a box."
I followed up with Boaler over the phone about an analysis of PISA data she's been working on that found the U.S. has more "memorizers" than most other countries. The study, which should be published this summer, looked at students' answers to questions about how they view math. "Some see math as a subject they have to think hard about, problem-solve, and use their own ideas," she told me. "And other kids think math has lots of methods they have to memorize. We know kids going down that memorization path are not going to do well."
That's because the kinds of math problems students will face in their lives—and the kinds of problems many are beginning to see under the Common Core State Standards—are all about conceptual understanding, she said.
"It's not that it's not useful to memorize things, but we do way too much of it," she said. "If kids get the idea that's what math is, we have problems. And not just with them understanding it, but with them liking it."
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