What Students Aren't Learning

Math is taught from kindergarten through 12th grade. Yet many students graduate without the basic skills they need as adults. These educators describe what students are missing:

"Large segments of the American public are unable to correctly infer facts from a pie chart, or to appreciate the impact of compounding interest on the value of an investment. This incapacity is the most serious consequence of the ineffective education in mathematics we are offering many American students. Indeed, I do not think that it is inappropriate to suspect that innumeracy played a large part in the willingness of borrowers to agree to mortgages that they could not reasonably expect to repay, a critical element in the current financial crisis."

-- Robert Root, associate mathematics department head, Lafayette College, Pennsylvania

"Everything seems to be focused on standardized testing -- how to get as many answers correct as possible. Students are never faced with the very possibility that what they learn makes any sense at all -- much less with the sense/meaning they should come away with, that we can build on the ideas. At a high school open house, I overheard one father argue with a mathematics teacher that fractions should not be taught at all. He didn't think that they are ever used. . . . Hmmm."

-- Bernd Rossa, associate math professor, Xavier University, Ohio

"I find many students unable to use the mathematics they know. For example, I teach a course I developed called mathematical reasoning. . . . Even though the students have 'credit' in college algebra and have had algebra in [the] K-12 [system], they do not know how to use it. For example, simple expressions such as A + .06A = 500 puzzle many students, whereas 2A + 3A = 500 does not. Why so? Well, most of the linear equations they have seen in school mathematics have integers such as 2 and 3 as coefficients."

-- Bernard Madison, math professor, University of Arkansas

"Students are still struggling with locating the appropriate mathematical concepts/formulas that are embedded within a real-world problem."

-- Todd Kelley, assistant professor of industrial technology, Purdue University, Indiana

"We should teach some consumer math: how to read an energy bill (for example, what does 'kilowatt-hours' mean?), how the stock and bond markets work, how the compound interest in savings plans works, how inflation affects savings, the CPI and other government indices, loan payments, credit cards, mortgages, budgets (federal, state), income taxes, etc. . . . We should probably educate them on how polls/surveys/studies can be biased, how graphics can be used to give false or misleading information, etc."

-- Stephen Andrilli, professor of math and computer science, La Salle University, Pennsylvania