Stop all the testing in math, and set free a generation of American mathematicians (op-ed by Jo Boaler)

Why do so many students either hate math, fear it or both?

If you ask most students what they think their role is in math classrooms, they will tell you it is to get questions right. Students rarely think that they are in math classrooms to appreciate the beauty of mathematics, to ask deep questions, to explore the rich set of connections that make up the subject, or even to learn about the applicability of the subject; they think they are in math classrooms to perform. This was brought home to me recently when a colleague, Rachel Lambert, told me that her 6-year-old son had come home saying he didn’t like math; when she asked him why, he said that math was “too much answer time and not enough learning time.”

Students from an early age realize that math is different from other subjects. In many schools across the U.S., math is less about learning than it is about answering questions and taking tests — performing.

The testing culture in the U.S., which is more pervasive in math than other subjects, is a large part of the problem. When sixth-graders in my local district came home saying that they had a test on the first day of middle school, it was in one subject only: math. Most students and parents didn’t question whether a test was the right way to introduce a new year of mathematics. As one girl said to me, “Well, the teacher was just finding out what we know.” But why does this only happen in math? Teachers in history or English don’t give tests on the first day to find out what students know. And why do so many math teachers boil the subject down to producing short answers to narrow questions under pressure? It is no wonder that so many students decide mathematics is not for them.

Read the full op-ed in The Hechinger Report. For a more in-depth explanation of her approach, see this story about her new book Mathematical Mindsets, learn about the materials offered through her program YouCubed at Stanford and listen to an interview with Jo Boaler on the BBC. You can also read a commentary by her on The Atlantic website and her op-ed in theHechinger Report.