By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
Posted Feb. 25, 2006
River Hills – When sixth-graders in Rebecca Neuwirth's math class at University School of Milwaukee open their textbooks, they're opening up a new way of learning that comes from a country where students do better in math than anywhere else in the world.
These math books feature people with names such as Jiaming and Aminah.
That's because they were developed by the Ministry of Education in Singapore, where students have outranked their international peers in math for nearly a decade.
In an age of global competition and at a time when educators debate whether it's better to stress mathematical reasoning over raw computation skills, the Singapore math textbooks add a new element to the discussion. They are being adopted by a growing number of private and public schools throughout the United States.
The books are distributed by an Oregon-based company known as SingaporeMath.com, which counts a private school in Madison as the first of its growing number of clients.
The biggest difference between math instruction in Singapore - a city-state with a population of about 4.4 million - and the United States is a simple premise: Less is more.
Students in Singapore are introduced to roughly half the number of new math topics a year as students in the United States are. Experts and policy analysts say Singapore's emphasis on depth over breadth is a formula for success.
The thicker the textbooks and the greater the volume of math topics introduced a year, the less likely American students and teachers are to achieve similar results, says Alan Ginsburg, director of the policy and program studies service at the U.S. Department of Education.
"There's no way you can teach twice the amount of mathematics to the same depth that Singapore does," says Ginsburg, co-author of a 2005 report called "What the United States Can Learn From Singapore's World-Class Mathematics System," published by the American Institutes for Research.
He says the Singapore method of teaching math also puts a bigger emphasis on understanding instead of "mechanical" memory, and on visualization of the problems.
"I feel like the biggest difference is the visualization," says Julia Rothacher, 12, a sixth-grader at University School.
Previously, she says, she attended Cumberland Elementary School in Whitefish Bay, where her class used the mathematical reasoning-based curriculum known as Everyday Math.
To appreciate what visualization can do, consider a problem that Neuwirth gave her class. It was considered the hardest question on a Massachusetts state assessment for 10th-graders, based on data that showed that more than half of the 72,000 test-takers got the question wrong, according to The Boston Globe, which published the problem.
Of the people in attendance at a recent baseball game, one-third had grandstand tickets, one-fourth had bleacher tickets, and the remaining 11,250 people in attendance had other tickets. What was the total number of people in attendance at the game?
The four choices were: A) 27,000, B) 20,000, C) 16,000 or D) 18,000.
Neuwirth's sixth-graders - without using the calculators that Massachusetts' 10th-graders could use - went to work.
Alexis Block, 12, did the problem on the board.
She drew 12 boxes of the same size, because 12 is the lowest common denominator of the denominators 3 and 4 in one-third and one-fourth, respectively.
She wrote "GS" for grandstand tickets above four - or one-third - of the 12 boxes, and "B" for bleachers above three - or one-fourth - of the 12 boxes.
She wrote 11,250 below the remaining five boxes, then divided 11,250 by five to get the value for each box - 2,250.
She multiplied the value of each box by 12 and got the correct answer for the total number of people in attendance: 27,000.
The school adopted the program after examining results from the "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2003" in which Singaporean students ranked first in the world in mathematics. U.S. students didn't place in the top 10. The authors contend the Singapore students do better because they are taught fewer new math concepts a year.
Another study, conducted by the American Institutes for Research, maintains that Singapore offers mathematically slower students special assistance from an expert teacher, whereas such students in the U.S. may be paired with instructors who lack specialized math training.
It also notes that Singapore has a national mathematics framework, whereas standards in the U.S. vary by state.
But it's not certain that Singapore Math is making a difference in U.S. test scores.
University School officials say they are compiling data to see whether scores have improved. And Jeff Thomas, a history professor who created a U.S. edition of Singapore Math after having lived in Singapore, says there has been no objective study on the program's effectiveness.
In his study of Singapore's math system, Ginsburg, of the U.S. Department of Education, looked at four sites in the U.S. where the Singapore approach had been adopted. Only two of those sites achieved results superior to control groups, and those two sites got additional staff development.
"It's not magic," Ginsburg says. "You can't just give out textbooks."
Teacher training in mathematics is urgently needed in the United States, where elementary school teachers typically have done worse on the math portions of college- entrance exams than those in other professions.
Echoing the American Institutes for Research study, Richard Askey, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that Singapore math standards are so high that "their sixth-grade students are expected to know more than we ask of our prospective middle-school teachers."
"The first thing we need to do is educate our prospective teachers much better," Askey says.
Copyright 2006 Journal Sentinel Inc.