Common Core Math Design Ignored Research on Math Learning
Dr. James Milgram who has become an outspoken opponent of the common core standards spoke to Breitbart News yesterday adding some additional insight to Dr. Martina Ratner’s comments in the Wall Street Journal.
“It is believed by most U.S. math education Ed.D.’s that at-risk students learn better using manipulatives and that the focus of U.S. standards should always be these students,” Milgram said. “So they choose pedagogy that effectively turns off the average and even more so the above-average students in a desire to focus on the weakest students.”
Milgram observes, however, “The research on how at-risk students learn most effectively is absolutely clear on the fact that this is the worst possible method for teaching these students this material.”
What Milgram is pointing out that the public needs to understand about these standards (and Missouri’s previous math standards) is the difference in approach to standards development between math educators and actual mathematicians. Math educators, who go through our schools of education, focus on pedagogy, or the process of teaching. This allows teachers to take students with numerous different learning styles and adjust their teaching methods to try to accommodate all the different students. Unfortunately what often happens, like in the Everyday Math program which uses the tactic of “spiraling” or returning again and again to a small element of the math concept, is that lessons are designed for the ease of the teacher’s pedagogy, not the best Common Core Math Design Ignored Research on Math Learning | Missouri Education Watchdog: