REPORT: MATH BOOK POOR

by Richard Whittler
Gannett News Service

Washington -- Only four of the dozen middle-school math textbooks evaluated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science have been rated “satisfactory.”
     The study released Friday is the latest of several reports suggesting middle schools are doing a poor job teaching both math and science.
     “I think the results of our analysis are yet another example of why the middle grades are such a problem,” said Gerald Kulm, who oversaw the evaluation for the Association’s Project 2061 -- named for the year Halley’s Comet returns.
     The questions raised by this study resemble the questions arising from last year’s Third International Math and Science Study, TIMSS. That study found U.S. elementary students faring well in international comparisons but 8th-graders scoring poorly.
     There are two problems, said William Schmidt, national research coordinator for the TIMSS.
     First, middle schools allow students to keep taking warmed-over arithmetic for far too long. Only about 20 percent of U.S. 8th-graders take algebra, compared with nearly 100 percent of 8th-graders in Japan and Germany.
     Second, the middle-grades curricula offer a “mile wide, inch deep” approach to both math and science -- serving up far too many topics in too little depth.
     The evaluators from the American Association for the Advancement of Science found the same problem.
     The worst textbooks, Kulm said, offered a laundry list of math subjects, followed by two pages of drills, followed by the next topic.
     Better textbooks, said Kulm, offered students some real-world exercises. Kulm cited one textbook that challenged students to plan a large-scale bicycle tour. Students had to develop bar graphs and charts predicting the cost involved, depending on the number of cyclists and the distance of the tour.