DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – This year’s STAAR test results saw a dramatic dip in students’ math scores.
SMU professor Annie Wilhelm says while the pandemic played a major role, it’s also time to re-examine how math is taught.
“We’ve been teaching the same things for a long time and even though the world and our technology has evolved and Google has evolved, we’re still expecting kids to do things they could do on a computer easily,” said Wilhelm.
She said she believes, to improve students test scores, teachers should decrease the amount of math topics studied per year.
“We could just get them to understand a [specific] area formula and get them to look up the area of the formula when they need it,” Wilhelm said “Thinking about what the average citizen needs, we want students to be mathematically literate.”
To help children get a better grasp on math, some professors encourage the use of websites and mathematizing the world around them.
Ultimately, Wilhelm is hopeful these strategies will steer students in a better direction of learning math.
“If we don’t start to take math more seriously, we might end up with a generation of kids who aren’t ready to solve problems that we, as a world, need to solve,” Wilhelm said.
