MATH SCORES DOWN
December 7, 2015
“For 25 years, through four presidential administrations, U.S. schools could rely on one small truth: Math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP test, always went up.
Not this year.
The latest results of the biennial tests, given to thousands of students and nicknamed “The Nation’s Report Card,” show a first-ever drop in math scores for the randomly selected students in both fourth- and eighth-grade students who took them earlier this year.” (USA TODAY, October 28, 2015)
This follows an earlier NAEP study, issued by the Department of Education, that reported that only 25 percent of our fourth graders are able to form opinions from what they read and that only 34 percent of our high school graduates can.
This lack of real progress in our schools is in sharp contrast to what has been taking place in American corporations where the results from training programs have shown marked improvement.
And, it appears that one of the answers lies in the adoption of media learning technologies into industrial training while our nation’s schools, too often, continue to adhere to the old lecture/reading method of instruction.
Many of the foundation skills and competencies (including math and reading) — so critical to the workplace — can be improved through the use of the new learning technologies.
Quoting from one research study, “Compared to conventional classrooms with their stress on verbal knowledge and multiple-choice test performance, technology provides a very different set of challenges and different ways in which students can demonstrate what they understand.”
The world is changing. And, both the reading minority and those less adept readers will benefit from the technology-learning advances so readily available.
Multiple-media instruction is proving to be the best pathway to better skills acquisition!
More on Wednesday – – –
— Bill Walton, co-Founder, ITC Learning
www.itclearning.com/blog/ (Mondays & Wednesdays)