Freshmen's weak math skills worry UW faculty
60 professors write open letter, saying freshmen unprepared
Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, February 28, 2008
Many college freshmen can't do basic math, and some instructors are dumbing down their classes to accommodate them, a group of University of Washington math, science and engineering professors warned in an open letter released Thursday.
"This is a big issue for us at the University of Washington," said Cliff Mass, a professor in the UW's atmospheric sciences department who gathered the 60 signatures on the letter.
He and his colleagues have noticed a rising number of students in their freshman classes who are unable to solve math problems at even a middle school level, indicating there are serious problems with how the subject is taught in the state, he said.
Physics Department Chairman David Boulware said he co-signed the letter because he's appalled that students don't have a better grasp on math by the time they get to college.
"They're confounded by simple algebra," he said.
The letter is being distributed to state legislators, who last year directed the state superintendent of public instruction to review and revise the state's math standards.
For months, a team of educators, mathematicians, parents and other experts has worked to rewrite the standards, which outline the math concepts and skills that students should learn in each grade.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson is scheduled to give the group's final draft to legislators Friday.
Mass and others still worry the revised standards aren't strong enough -- and that the process was too heavily influenced by education experts, not mathematicians.
"There's a tremendous bifurcation between the people who need math and use math in their jobs ... and the people who teach math," he said.
Education experts tend to favor "inquiry-based" teaching methods, in which students are encouraged to discover underlying math concepts instead of always being given a formula or algorithm, but that approach obviously hasn't worked, he said. The shift to those types of math programs has left more and more students taking remedial math courses when they arrive at college, he said.
But Brian Jeffries, the graduation policy director for the state superintendent, said that's not really the case. The UW is required to report to the state the number of students who take remedial classes, and figures from 2005-06, the most recent data available, show only about 2 percent of the Washington public high school students who enter the university end up taking remedial math courses, he said.
Still, state officials hope to eventually eliminate the need for such remedial classes, by developing a universal "readiness test" for students applying to Washington colleges.
By fall of 2009, high school students could take the math placement test to gauge whether they're ready for college-level work -- and if not, it would give them time to get up to speed before they graduate, Jeffries said.
The concern over UW students' math skills isn't universal at the school -- and even those who agree it's a problem don't see eye to eye on the solution.
None of the instructors from the UW's College of Education, which trains future teachers, signed the letter.
That's not too surprising, UW spokesman Norm Arkans said, because the issue is rather controversial.
"We've got a bunch of different people working on math education, and they don't necessarily agree on what the best approach is," he said.
Even math experts disagree. Ginger Warfield, a senior lecturer in the UW Mathematics Department who served on the committee that helped draft the new math standards, said the "sky is falling" rhetoric is irritating and divisive.
"Washington math isn't a disaster," she said. "By many measures, we're fine, and relative to the rest of the country, we're much better."
Incoming freshmen do need stronger math skills, but the answer isn't to just give up and go back to traditional methods of teaching math -- it doesn't work for everyone, Warfield said.
Mathematicians may mean well, "but they have no clue how to teach math to children," she said. "They know how to teach it at the collegiate level, but it's quite different teaching a first-grader than teaching a freshman."