Thank you for taking on PISA. David Spiegelhalter says some interesting things about the overall ratings. The UK recently dropped in rankings (though I suspect this is not one of their main worries just now) and he pointed out that the movement is within the margin of error, and it is simply the fact that they use rankings that makes some countries look as if they are doing much worse. Now that would be an interesting thing to simulate!

I love aspects of pure maths. Discrete maths such as networks, permutations and combinations and suchlike are such fun. But I emphasise statistics as I think it has such a wide applicability to citizenship and social justice. Basically though, any mathematical science or branch of maths, taught well, is going to enrich the lives of our people.

Keep up the inspiring and thought-provoking work.

Same thing is true for studies that claim that students who take calculus are the most likely to succeed in college. No Duh! That is because those who are most likely to succeed in college take calculus.

The course work does not cause the discrepancy, the discrepancy determines the course work.

I am not familiar with the PISA items … but … math scores on WHAT? If it is math scores on pure math items then this is an utterly ridiculous result to even report.

Hi Karen, as the article mentions, “First, the PISA exam itself is largely a test of applied math, not equation-solving.” So this isn’t a case of pure math students just doing well because they were given a pure math exam.

Dick Fuller:

From what I can tell it, there is no good general quantitative problem solving material available at the school level. Could someone tell me I am wrong?

Statway and Quantway are two programs that more than fit the bill for “good general quantitative problem solving material,” I think. Give them a look and see what you think.

Kelly Berg:

I am so excited about this last post. Not for reasons most others might be excited for this post though. I am planning on having my AP Stats read this blog to allow us to discuss experiments and show them a “real life” example instead of some contrived story problem.

Awesome. Have at it.

If I forced my applied students into the theoretical route and exposed them to more advanced math that already makes little sense to them they would fail and shutdown like I’ve seen happen many times . Not perform better.

Eg recently I had one grade 10 student who was a wonder in grade 10 applied class and when her mom pushed her to go into the purely theoretical grade 11 instead of applied grade 11 the girl dropped to the lowest possible score because nothing made sense anymore.

I think the reality is that Pisa is not a very good indicator of what math should be taught at all and if traditionally China and Korea taught theoretical math and their kids performed better than more applied American kids it’s simply an indicator of different culture not a cause effect factor.

Teaching with “dimensional analysis” as much as possible and then stressing that “x, and y” are abstractions to save time and to see how different problems are attacked similarly works well for my students. Think Chemistry conversions!