Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, has long been worrying about the declining math skills of UW freshmen. He recently drove his point home quite visually with a math assessment of his UW atmospheric sciences 101 class. It turns out his results were largely confirmed by a similar assessment in James Prager's UW earth and space sciences class.
I have had two epiphanies this year.
1) I have come to suspect that Seattle's K12 Every Day Math curriculum is deeply flawed — and I was surprised to find that there are actually ample reviews of the approach out there (Professor Klein's assessment might be the most damning) that could have provided the Seattle school board a heads-up (I guess there are already some regrets…).
2) The math skills I encounter in my economics classes at the University of Washington seem to have become weaker over the past 16 years. Watching Cliff Mass's video, I started to understand why. So I gave my students Cliff's math assessment test.
Here is the good news: The results show some positive impact of going to school at the UW. My UW students are mostly upperclassmen (87% are juniors and seniors), while Cliff Mass's class had only 39% upperclassmen. The overall score was significantly higher for my students: 78% vs. 58%. So much for the good news.
Still, a whopping 51% of students could not solve for x from y=x/(1-x); and 55% could not simplify 25*103/(5*10-5) to 5*108. The absence of a good foundation seems to have been addressed by the university's curriculum to some degree; but the 78% average score for my upperclassmen (on what is, after all, a high school level math test) remains cause for concern.
Ok, this was only one test, in one year, which did not involve scientific testing methodology, and it is certainly not appropriate to lay a trend line through one observation. But I am still tempted to think the dismal results do not seem like a failure of the students, but a failure of the system to provide a solid K12 math education.***
***I have also been alerted by one of my colleagues who teaches game theory that, under some circumstances, a student's best strategic response on an ungraded "assessment" exam may be to pretend to know nothing. This does not explain the declining math scores in the UW assessment test that Cliff describes in his video. Purposely generating low scores in that exam is costly to students because it implies higher tuition costs to cover remedial math courses.