BC High School Student Math Skills in Trouble: Group
BC schools are not teaching students proper math and science to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, claims the Educational Quest Society of Canada (EQSC), a group of Chinese-educated tutors at public and private institutions who recently published a report on the deteriorating state of K-12 education, particularly math, in the province. They suggest that BC should be looking to China for possible remedies where greater emphasis is placed on basic concepts, rigor in teaching and homework assignment, and employment of teachers with specialized math credentials.
Proof of the decline in BC students’ math performance, they say, can be readily found in the 2010 Pan-Canadian Assessment program that tested the math abilities of 32,000 Grade 8 students across Canada. BC students scored 481, well below the national average of 500 and considerably lower than the top three provinces Quebec (515), Ontario (507), and Alberta (495).
The results were basically consistent with the well-known Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 2010 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey. The results for 15-year old math skills showed that while Canada’s 527 score was much higher than the OECD average (496), Canada still ranked 10th among 70 countries, down three places since an earlier survey in 2006. Shanghai topped the world with a score of 600, followed by Singapore (a country with a mostly ethnic Chinese population), and Hong Kong. The US faired much worse, scoring a full 40 points below Canada and 9 points below the OECD average.
Within Canada, BC scored four points below the national average and 11 points below its score in 2000. Some critics attribute the drop to the BC Liberal government’s decision to halt reevaluation of the math curriculum in the early 2000s. The Minister of Education at the time was Christy Clark, now BC Premier, who changed the ministry’s priorities from curriculum reform to overall educator accountability.
Interviewed by straight.com, John (Pi) Yuan, a member of EQSC, drew a laundry list of concerns including the elimination of calculus from Grade 12 math requirements which he said diminishes the value of BC diplomas. The recent Ministry of Education decision to do away with all Grade 12 provincial exams except English 12 or its equivalent, according to the EQSC, will be most harmful to educational standards, student motivation, teacher enthusiasm, and public accountability.
“If you compare the math textbooks the students are using now and textbooks that were used 10 or 20 years ago, you can see that the content is getting less and less (difficult)”, Mr Yuan told the news portal. Speaking to the Vancouver Sun, Sharon Shen, another EQSC member who had owned and operated the Elite Education Center private tutoring schools in Burnaby and Richmond agreed: “It’s weak and getting weaker. We feel there is a crisis.”
Arvind Gupta, a UBC math professor and CEO of Mitacs Inc., a national non-profit organization that puts graduate students in many disciplines together with companies to help solve their problems, emphasized that math knowledge is increasingly important on the job market. Nowadays, Professor Gupta points out, all sorts of occupations require significant math skills. The genomic revolution, for example, involves the heavy application of mathematics to life sciences. Math is essential for engineering, architecture, medicine, and other sectors, not to mention of growing importance in the social sciences, he explained to straight.com.
Over the past three years, the BC Ministry of Education has instituted a revised math curriculum for grades 10 through 12 that reduces repetition while emphasizing apprenticeship and workplace application, basic foundations, and pre-calculus. Although the EQSC acknowledges that Chinese methods should not be mechanically transplanted to Canada, it maintains that BC math teaching and curriculum must return to basics.
“We agree that an education system ignoring students’ differences should be changed. But, if differences were over emphasized to negate regularity, and if traditional classroom lectures were replaced with ‘personalized teaching’, the consequences on fundamental knowledge and skills would be disastrous”, EQSC’s report stated. For these reasons, the advocacy group puts “top priority” on restoring the Grade 12 provincial examinations, especially mathematics.