What is Singapore Mathematics all about

[Music] how do you go from last to first Singapore will tell you you base your decisions off of research and what did that research tell them it told them that if you change the way you teach math and science your economy can change not only did their economy change but their academic performance changed changed as well let's take a look what you're seeing here are the results from the data from the 2015 tins test first look at the beginning column that gray column it gives us just a few a sampling of a few different countries the next column over will give you the mean score the International score being 500 that means you're right on target grade level you're there United States scores it 518 and Singapore at 621 a difference of 40 points would constitute one grade level but what's most impressive about their academic performance are those next two columns the advanced and the high these are problems that a computer can't solve we would refer to these as novel problems Singapore scores very high in comparison to us but also to the international average so the world wants to know what did they do let's look at what they did before and what they're doing now that changed their academic performance and their economy what did they do before look familiar they believed that memorizing steps and doing procedures again and again and again was what we would refer to as mathematics they thought to make math hard just make the numbers bigger and that was hard math they've changed that mindset they now believe that tedious what are they doing now they based their curriculum off of what I'm gonna refer to as five guys the first guy we're going to look at reminds us that mathematics is learn best when we can connect concrete pictorial and abstract representations his name Jerome Bruner he's a researcher from the United States out of Harvard in this picture you can see the concrete experience with the manipulatives the pictorial with the bar model and then the abstract or the symbolic nature with the division sign and the equal Jerome Bruner reminds us we were born with visual brains so when we teach math conceptually we need to link the ideas in that concrete pictorial abstract representation in linking ideas Richards skimp a British researcher reminds us that sometimes the conventions we use convincing conventions such as when we do problems like three hundred minus twenty four and we have kids crossing out numbers these conventions are sometimes mysterious or encoded and that there has to be a progression so that students can relate ideas they are not going to understand that abstract or that conventional method right away so it's our job to link those ideas another researcher led by gots key he tells us that collaboration their collaborative environments are the best environment to learn it that's real world talking arguing discussing proving your point that's when you learn you don't learn in isolation so if I got ski reminds us that our classrooms should have collaborative structures in place Zoltan Dean's is our fourth of the five guys and Zoltan Dean's tells us that the tasks that we pick sometimes people refer to this as an anchor task that task has to be engaging and when you move from task to task or from lesson to lesson there's a slight variable that changes and you can't jump too fast or else kids aren't going to be able to connect ideas and the teacher is gonna have to tell more than allowing the student to explore talk about exploring Piaget is the fifth researcher they base their curriculum off of that says play play play kids need time to construct knowledge so Singapore says teach less and learn more allowed kids to explore and construct their knowledge so let us talk about what that would look like in our classrooms in reviewing what they did to get the results so Singapore that idea of teach less learn more you'll see here in if we look back at those Tim's results in this table you'll notice the tenth and the 90th percentiles the tenth percentile is referring to the bottom group of students in their country they're still scoring at grade level they do this in the way that they wrote their curriculum they wrote their curriculum in a way that the lowest level kid can learn enough to get by while still challenging those high level kids with the choice of anchor tasks and the straw sure's that they put in place in their classroom so what is it that you can do in your classroom to get these kind of results we need to look a little bit more at their curriculum and the idea that we have to ask kids to persevere when problems get hard to give them more of those novel and those problem-solving opportunities because it's not that Singapore students are necessarily smarter but they'll claim they had more opportunity to explore to persevere and were challenged and encouraged to do so for some reason we believe that struggle in our country is a result of not being good at math and if you struggle I just must not understand the concept we got to change that mindset we have to think a little bit more like Joe bowler reminds us with that growth mindset that productive struggle that when we struggle we're actually our brains are actually growing so Singapore took those ideas where you know wrote procedural mathematics was the way they thought mathematics should be taught look at Malaysia scores in referring back to this idea of rote memorization Singapore will tell you that they believed if they would not have changed the way that they taught math remember that rote procedures make the numbers bigger that they would still be scoring the way Malaysia is scoring instead they decided to make those changes what were those changes we're going to make sure that we teach math in a concrete pictorial abstract representation we're gonna link the ideas when we teach them we're gonna allow kids to talk in collaborative environments and not only talk but give them time to explore if we do these things you're gonna notice differences the way your kids learn mathematics and the way they perceive mathematics you actually may have kids that enjoy math class and want to come back and study more mathematics there's your challenge now let's take these five guys get their ideas into your classroom and implement a more effective curriculum [Music]

Channel: mathodology

Views: 47,046

Keywords: Singapore Math, CPA, SIngapore Methods

Id: d2Aav4gykwA

Length: 9min 14sec (554 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018