New Way To Teach To Math Adopted

County Schools Find Course More Effective

When some teachers and parents began considering a proposed alternative math program at Neabsco Elementary School that did not rely on hardcover textbooks, they were skeptical.

The program -- "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space" -- uses mostly worksheets and often poses math questions as real-life anecdotes, requiring students to show how they can solve a problem in many ways rather than merely scribble answers based on memorized formulas.

Teachers at the Woodbridge school were intrigued. But they still worried that without a regular regimen of worksheets with cut-and-dried questions, students would be ill-prepared for the Virginia Standards of Learning exams.

Some hard data showed "Investigations" was closing the achievement gap between white and minority students, a high-stakes goal that school districts nationwide are scrambling to meet under the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act. After the program was initiated for Neabsco's third-graders last academic year, school officials saw sharp increases in the number of students passing the SOLs, including black students and those in special education classes.

"We've just been so used to teaching algorithms without any real explanation of why we do them in a certain way," said Neabsco Principal Linda Trexler, who has been in the Prince William County public school system for 35 years. "But we get at more fundamental knowledge of math this way. We talk and we write about math. The kids love it. They're just not memorizing stuff."

The curriculum was devised by TERC, a nonprofit education organization based in Cambridge, Mass., and distributed by the educational publishing firm Pearson Scott Foresman. The School Board approved it last week to serve as the basis for the county's elementary school math curriculum.

In the fall, "Investigations" will be taught to all students from kindergarten through second grade. Third- and fourth-graders will begin using the materials in the 2007-08 academic year, and fifth-graders will join the following year, said Carol Knight, the system's math department supervisor.

Some teachers in the majority of the county's elementary schools have tested the program in the past several years, Knight said. "Investigations" quickly became popular, making the traditional way to teach math seem dated and out-of-touch.

For example, in traditional math, fifth-graders are asked to measure a cube and are given its length, width and height. The student then simply multiply the measurements to find the volume, Knight said. In "Investigations," students would be asked do the same task but in a broader context. "They'd try to find out how much space there is for air in a classroom," Knight said. "There would be many ways to solve that. They will be doing a lot of measurements, and then they might make a model of the classroom, using a box for cubes."

In lower grades, where students wouldn't be expected to know division, "Investigations" would teach the concept without asking them to perform division based on a traditional formula.

"They'd be asked, 'Imagine if you have seven brownies to share among four people. How many will each person get?' " Knight said. "What's good about that is they'll use drawings, and they're forced to figure out the process on their own."