Students are barely beginning to recover from a historic decline in math performance. Across every grade and region of the country, students in every racial, income, and disability group have flatlined or lost ground since 2015, wiping out nearly two decades of math progress across the country.
These declines have been driven by struggling students who are falling further and further behind. About a quarter of 4th graders and nearly 40 percent of 8th graders—including a majority of Black and Latino students and those from low-income households—cannot meet basic achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That means they might struggle to find the area of a rectangle or to compare fractions to percentages.
While pandemic-era school disruptions worsened learning loss and achievement gaps and have exacerbated math-teacher shortages in many districts, several areas of math achievement have been on the downward slope for more than a decade. In particular, 4th and 8th grade students continue to decline in geometry skills, which have not rebounded at all since the pandemic.
Many teachers report having less time to cover a wide variety of math topics with students across disparate achievement levels.
A nationally representative survey of educators conducted by the EdWeek Research Center this spring shows how the bell curve has flattened in many classrooms. More than 60 percent of math teachers said their lowest-performing students trail two, three, or even more years below grade level, while nearly 70 percent of math teachers said their highest-achieving students work at least a year ahead of grade level.
Teachers have limited preservice training in how to approach key math concepts and links while differentiating across such a wide range of student needs. But trying to cover too many concepts without connecting them can backfire in a similar way to cramming for a test—leading to students “turning the math brain off.”
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Doing math requires that students understand concepts and operations and their relations to each other; compute math procedures efficiently and correctly; apply strategies and formulas to problems correctly; and understand the reasons that underlie the solutions to a problem and transfer them correctly to new problems.
Beyond those cognitive skills, students also need to see math as useful and doable, as well as necessary to their progress as learners.
Here are five research-aligned strategies and techniques to help all students learn math.
- Screening. Experts estimate that 5 percent to 8 percent of students have developmental dyscalculia, a learning disability associated with severe, persistent difficulty in math. That’s roughly the same share as students who have dyslexia, a learning disability that affects reading. And roughly 25 percent of students have severe math anxiety, which can also significantly impair math learning. Yet, significantly fewer students are assessed for dyscalculia than dyslexia and even fewer for math anxiety. Early and systematic screening for both cognitive and mental health-related math challenges can help teachers intervene more effectively with struggling students.
- Fact fluency. Even in an age of universal calculators, all students need to develop automatic, fluent recall of basic math facts, such as addition/subtraction or multiplication tables. Interventions for students struggling in math at any grade—not just elementary levels—should include at least 10 minutes per class dedicated to building fluency in basic math facts. Recall, however, should be practiced in the context of learning the concepts underlying these facts (e.g., the links between addition and multiplication or the relationships between variables in an equation).
- Making connections. Math concepts build upon each other, and there’s strong evidence that students need explicit, systematic instruction to understand how foundational concepts connect to each other. Students should have regular opportunities to discuss and justify different approaches to solving problems, and teachers should encourage them to think about the underlying logic of their approaches.
- Monitoring and reflection. Students who start the school year performing below grade level in math have been found to improve faster than average with interventions, but often the pace is still not quick enough to catch up with higher-performing students by the end of the school year. Both teachers and struggling students should regularly monitor student progress to identify the most important skills and concepts needed to continue to learn grade-level content.
- High-dosage tutoring. Instruction that takes place one-on-one or in very small groups and is provided by a trained teacher or tutor at least three times a week, or for about 50 hours a semester, has been shown to be the most effective approach to accelerating student learning in math. But only 10 percent of students—and only 2 percent of students who struggle most—receive math support at that level. Coordinating schedules, lesson-planning time, and other supports for teachers to incorporate such tutoring into the school day can boost its effectiveness and sustainability.
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
