Children’s math skills ‘non-transferable’ without effective pedagogy, study finds

A study looking at urban Indian children has found their maths skills are not transferable between “real-world” and theoretical contexts.

The study concluded that maths pedagogy in India should focus on explicitly translating intuitive maths skills to formal contexts and vice-versa. 

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The study has implications for maths pedagogy in New Zealand, as it suggests that maths learning happens effectively and organically when situated in contexts relevant to students’ wider lives and identities. One 2022 publication from NZCER reviewing relevant local literature on maths learning found kaiako should “engage in culturally sustaining pedagogies utilise contextual tasks that support ākonga Māori and Pacific learners to engage with big mathematical and statistical ideas in meaningful and relevant ways…

“When ākonga learn within cultural contexts that already have meaning for them, these familiar contexts allow a focus on the mathematics, and kaiako are able to increase levels of challenge in the problems ākonga work with.”

In India, as in New Zealand, children are not achieving at expected levels for maths. In New Zealand, less than half of Year Eight students are meeting expectations in maths.  

The study was conducted with children in Dehli and Kolkata. Children working in markets were found to perform well on contextual maths problems, using mental arithmetic with high accuracy. However, when presented with math questions in abstract formats commonly used in school that were equally, or less challenging, the children performed poorly.  

Researchers speculated that “self-stereotyping” may be a factor with these results, where children who work in markets deem themselves bad at school and couldn’t apply knowledge they had previously demonstrated.  

Researchers then tested arithmetic skills of nearby school children with no market experience and found they performed poorly in applied contexts. Additionally, children without market experience used inefficient written calculations, found it difficult to combine operations and were slow.  

The researchers concluded that “these findings point to a broader failure of the pedagogical practices in India to make usable connections between intuitive and formal understanding of maths ideas.  

“These findings call for a maths pedagogy that explicitly addresses these translational challenges through curricula that connects abstract maths symbols and concepts to intuitively meaningful contexts and problems.”  

The findings and recommendations from the Indian study align with best practice math pedagogy in New Zealand.  

One resource from The Education Hub on effective math teaching and learning in secondary schools notes that effective maths teachers should consider the context and interests of students.  

Maths educators are advised to “link [maths] to everyday real life open activities, in which students can investigate, make mathematical decisions, discuss and debate.”  

On Te Kete Ipurangi, alongside explicit teaching methods, teachers are encouraged to first contextualise their students culturally to build a learning community for mathematics and statistics inquiry.

This may include understanding what background knowledge and “intuitive” math practices a student already holds from using math operations in their daily lives.