Math Esteem
Rate Your Students is one of my new guilty pleasures. Today’s entry reminded me of this Washington Post article reporting a study of math achievement and self-esteem.
Apparently people in higher-achieving math countries have lower self-esteem, among other things. Conclusion: school doesn’t have to be fun or empowering!
Personally, I think this study is to education what Froot Loops are to breakfast.
The main flaw with this study is that it’s a cross-national study of two cultural phenomena: self-esteem and education, and thus it’s majorly confounded.
If you were to do a cross-national assessment of just self-esteem, you’d find much the same pattern: high self-esteem in the US, low self-esteem in Asia. Self-esteem is a particularly American construct that doesn’t necessarily translate to other cultures.
Education is also very strongly tied to culture—the amount of emphasis on education and on different academic subjects, what’s valued in the assessments, what the purpose of education is perceived to be, etc. It’s pretty meaningless to study self-esteem and math achievement without considering all these other cultural factors.
The reporting of this study by the Washington Post also leaves something to be desired. It uses my least favorite tactic of trying to create a debate where there is none.
Some Asian nations have begun to copy aspects of U.S. education, including the emphasis on letting students search for answers rather than memorize them.
That may be true for some subjects, but rings completely false for math. In fact, this is exactly backwards for math. Reports of the TIMSS study and many, many other studies of math education all cite the overemphasis on memorization of isolated facts and procedures as a major cause for the American failures in math achievement.
Many reform models for math education in this country recommend following the Japanese model of using creative problem-solving exercises extensively in math lessons. These exercises are built around major math concepts and often require students to use their conceptual understanding to generate novel problem-solving procedures.
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