The future elementary school teachers that Mark Montgomery works with at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, share a common fear:
Most of them are “extremely anxious” about math.
“A lot of them will identify that they want to teach K-2, they don’t want to teach a tested grade level. And part of that is that they think the content is easier,” said Montgomery, an associate professor of education who teaches math-methods courses. It’s a misconception that he works to counter.
“They don’t necessarily understand the depth of that foundation that they’re preparing kindergarten students [with], and how that builds throughout the rest of their math education,” he said.
This idea—that skills like counting, adding, and multiplying aren’t the easy stuff in math, but rather form a critical foundation that must be well taught—underpins a new, multi-university initiative to improve educator preparation in early numeracy instruction.
The network, launched by the nonprofit Deans for Impact, starts a year-long collaboration between Stephen F. Austin State University and two other schools, Sam Houston State University and Texas A&M University-Texarkana. Together, they prepare about 3,000 teachers annually.
Plummeting math scores on national and international assessments, post-pandemic, demonstrate a need for action, said Amber Willis, vice president of program at Deans for Impact.
“There is this desire to go back to the source,” she said, referencing students’ earliest exposure to the subject.
This focus on the building blocks of math knowledge echoes the “science of reading” movement, a push to align beginning reading instruction with evidence-based practice. State legislation on this issue, mandating changes to literacy approaches, often cites the same rationale: Students can’t develop higher-level reading skills if they don’t have a firm foundation.
“Mathematics knowledge is highly cumulative in nature,” said Heather Peske, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy group that has reviewed teacher-preparation programs since 2006. (Peske is not involved in the the new network.)
Students’ ability to learn new concepts is “highly dependent” on their mastery of what has come before, she said.
Identifying areas for improvement; filling instructional gaps in math
Currently, elementary educator-preparation programs don’t devote enough time to math content, according to NCTQ’s reviews.
The group’s standard of at least 150 instructional hours, or 10 credits in math—105 hours in content and 45 in pedagogy—was developed by an expert advisory panel, taking into account recommendations from national math educator groups.
On average in 2022, undergraduate teaching programs only spend 85 hours on math content, though they exceeded the recommendation for pedagogy with an average of 49 credit hours.
One goal of the Deans for Impact network is to understand how these trends map onto these three Texas universities: Where do current course content and clinical teaching experiences lack adequate focus in early-numeracy instruction? Where are there opportunities to strengthen what’s offered? Teacher-candidates in these programs will also take a numeracy assessment, Willis said.
Eventually, all of this information-gathering will inform the development of instructional “modules,” aimed to shore up areas of greatest need, that university faculty can use in their courses. Math faculty, education faculty, university supervisors, and some K-12 educators are involved in the project.
Wading into discussions about best practice for early math instruction inevitably dredges up ideological questions. Is it better for teachers to focus on teaching operations and offering students lots of practice, so that they become comfortable and fluent? Or should teachers ensure that students understand the math concepts, like whole numbers, regrouping, and place value, that underlie these procedures?
Deans for Impact is trying to avoid this either-or framing.
“We are thinking about trying to balance inquiry-based instruction with explicit instructional strategies,” Willis said.
The organization has published a primer on the science behind how young children learn, which covers evidence-based approaches to teaching counting, arithmetic, and abstract knowledge of mathematical concepts.
So far, Willis said, participants have already surfaced some areas for improvement. At one university, for example, math and education faculty realized that their courses weren’t optimally scheduled. Introduction to elementary math was taught freshman year, first semester, but those same students didn’t take a math-methods course until senior year.
But Montgomery, the math methods professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, has less technical—if perhaps thornier—goals in mind for the network. He hopes the work helps him address with his students their underlying fears that they’re bad at math, and their assumption that they can avoid it in the earliest grades.
The first few classes are “more therapy” than math, he said, as he tries to get future elementary teachers to open up to the subject.
“I think it is incredibly important that they understand, for lack of a better term, that kindergarten isn’t the easy way out,” he said.
