While many school districts have been fixated in recent years on helping young students rebuild flagging math skills, there’s also a growing awareness that math learning among middle and high schoolers is badly off track.
Recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress show a decline in 12th graders’ math scores extending back more than a decade.
A survey conducted by the EdWeek Research Center also offers cause for worry about older students’ experience in the subject.
The portion of middle and high school teachers and administrators who describe students’ struggles in math as severe or very severe (44% for middle school and 40% for high school) is larger than the portion of educators at the upper elementary level (34%).
EdWeek recently published a special report looking at middle and high school students’ shortcomings in math, and how to help them.
Here are four key takeaways about teenagers’ math struggles, and how schools are trying to find solutions.
1. A core group of foundational concepts—such as fractions—scuttle many older students’ progress
An EdWeek Research Center survey asked classroom educators and administrators about baseline skills that trip up students on the way to more advanced math.
Fractions ranked at the top, along with pre-algebraic skills and fluency in basic operations.
EdWeek’s special report describes a number of strategies to support students in these areas.
Senior Staff Writer Sarah Schwartz describes in her story in the report how some educators are focusing on rebuilding students’ very basic computational skills. (In one example, a teacher focused on subtraction up to the number 9 and multiplication up to the number 1—stunning her teacher peers, who initially questioned the need for such basic grounding.)
Other lessons combine reviews of previous material and new content; and offer targeted professional development on how teachers can cover topics that vex many middle schoolers, such as fractions (more on that below).
An EdWeek video featured in the special report describes an approach used by teachers in a South Bend, Ind., school to gauge students’ readiness for algebra and select an algebra course and target academic support based on their needs.
The school also uses tutoring and co-teaching—including having traditional classroom teachers receive assistance from special education teachers. In addition, the school has sought to look at the areas where 9th graders struggle and align their interventions all the way down to kindergarten.
2. Middle school strategies to support students are “all over the place”
Many elementary schools have dedicated interventionists to support struggling math learners, notes Senior Staff Writer Sarah Schwartz, in a story in the special report.
In middle school, however, strategies to support struggling students are “all over the place,” in terms of the types of content that receive extra focus and the structure of that math support, said one instructional designer.
Some of the strategies educators have found effective in different contexts are various kinds of skill-grouping and peer-to-peer tutoring. Other school officials say they’ve seen a payoff in middle and high school from explicit instruction on math concepts.
And spending extra time reconstructing student knowledge with concepts that trip many of them—such as fractions, and plotting fractions on a number line—offers a payoff, one researcher observed.
“By the time you’re in middle school, it’s often very focused on abstract symbols—which is good, children need to know that,” Nancy Jordan, a professor of learning sciences at the University of Delaware, told Education Week. “But sometimes, they need more practice.”
3. Districts and tech orgs are experimenting with AI “personalization” to engage students in math
Many middle and high school students fail to see the relevance of math to their lives. One strategy some educators are using to try to get past that is customizing lessons to individual students’ passions through AI, EdWeek’s Alyson Klein reports.
Many of those efforts are nascent. And the legacy of overhyped promises about tech’s ability to “personalize” learning hangs over them.
But some tech advocates see promise in these approaches, and educators are already experimenting with them.
Klein cites the example of a California math teacher who took the simple step during a lesson of putting a prompt into an AI tool to play off his students’ curiosity about the job market. The platform responded with federal data showing correlations between education level, gender, and median weekly income.
It then helped the teacher craft lessons that dug into those numbers, using statistical strategies they’re working to master.
“When I design these types of lessons without AI, it takes me hours,” said the math teacher, Al Rabanera, of La Vista High School in Fullerton, Calif., in the story. “I’ve done it before, looking at all the trends and themes, grouping and coding them, and then sharing it back with the kids.”
4. Schools are relying on a blend of strategies to support English learners
The language of math—words like table and division—can confound English learners. In trying to help them, schools are focused on building not only their vocabulary, but also their in-class confidence—and those goals turn out to be related.
EdWeek’s Jennifer Vilcarino spoke with educators at a pair of schools that take very different approaches to helping older English learners pick up math concepts they may never have been exposed to, and venture into more complex topics.
One of the schools was Annandale High School in Virginia, where classroom educators seek to build classroom communities to nurture students’ comfort, through small-group instruction and other means.
“Math can be really challenging, and especially learning math in a new language,” Anna Kyle, an ESOL and math teacher at the school who leads an Algebra I Plus, a double-block, daily class offered in English and designed for multilingual learners.
“My No. 1 goal is to make sure that kids feel like they can ask questions, that they can make mistakes, and that they feel comfortable enough to learn,” Kyle said, “because learning can’t take place if you’re really uncomfortable.”
