Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Critique of U.S. Math "Strands" Structure

The big influence of the first California framework, “The Strands Report”, published during the new math movement, was to fundamentally change the structure of U.S. mathematics content from a core-subject structure to a strands structure. During the past few decades, although the names of items changed from “strands” to “areas” to “standards”, the strands structure has remained. The damage this structure has caused to U.S. elementary mathematics education is the instability of content, discontinuity in instruction, and incoherence in concepts.

The online platform tracks progress across six different strands:

Number Sense: Integers
Number Sense: Decimals and Fractions
Geometry
Logic and Reasoning
Measurement
Data/Statistics/Probability

A student could be at different levels in each strand. However, all strands must "graduate"to the next grade simultaneously. For instance, if a student completes the statistics strand one month before the others, the system increases the number of non-statistical questions until all strands make it to the next grade. The system adapts the difficulty and number of questions in a given topic according to the student's progress. Hence, every single student moves at a different speed and through a unique set of problems.

The adaptive motion engine at the core of the EPGY online course software is designed to adjust the number and sequence of exercises presented to each student based on their level of mastery of the concepts being taught, both in Math and in LA&W (Suppes 1967). Each concept typically has more than a dozen associated exercises, but if a student successfully
answers most of the first several exercises, the motion engine sees that the student has mastered this concept, and advances the student to the next concept. Conversely, if a student misses several exercises after being taught a concept, the motion engine will continue to present exercises for that concept until the student demonstrates mastery. If a student shows continued difficulty with a given concept, the motion engine will move the student back to a prior concept, enabling the student to review the earlier building blocks needed for eventual mastery of the more challenging concept. The motion engine also weaves together the various strands that make up each course, at each step drawing the next presented concept from whichever strand will keep the student advancing through the grade while keeping progress aligned across the strands. The complex algorithm driving this adaptation of the movement through the course ensures that students are focusing their time in the course on concepts that challenge them while matching their mastery level, so the students stay engaged and rewarded in the learning process.

Some advantages of strands could be that

(1) changing topics after a few minutes maintains interest
(2) if a student is stuck on a topic, he can still move to other strands and feel successful

I will say that I had to laugh a little when I read:


I laughed because the former is the precise thing that drives my own top-down, mastery learner to distraction about the way that math (or anything else) is commonly taught in schools. She calls this the "ADD model of education."

[quote=HowlerKarma]I will say that I had to laugh a little when I read:

[quote]
Some advantages of strands could be that

(1) changing topics after a few minutes maintains interest
(2) if a student is stuck on a topic, he can still move to other strands and feel successful[/quote

I laughed because the former is the precise thing that drives my own top-down, mastery learner to distraction about the way that math (or anything else) is commonly taught in schools. She calls this the "ADD model of education."

My children like EPGY and have learned from it. In recent EPGY sessions, my 3rd-grader, doing EPGY 5th grade math, has worked on

multiplication of numbers with several digits
long division
multiplying and dividing fractions
identifying lines of symmetry
logic
getting information from bar graphs and pie graphs

IMO, this is what is wrong with US and UK 'modern' education.

5th grade? EPGY (which is supposed to be for gifted kids, right?) tell me you are joking.

Here is how it was when I was a kid in the UK back in the 70s:-

multiplication of numbers with several digits - 2td grade (on paper at first and then mentally)
long division - 2rd grade (ditto)
multiplying and dividing fractions -3th grade
identifying lines of symmetry - 2nd grade
logic - not sure that this refers to in this context
getting information from bar graphs and pie graphs - so obvious I don't ever remember being 'told' how these worked