News Release

Contact at AMS: Tim Goggins (401) 455-4110, FAX (401) 331-3842, tjg@ams.org

Providence, RI - The past several decades have seen many attempts to reform mathematics education in the United States. And yet, among educational experts, mathematicians, and teachers - as well as many parents - there remains the strong conviction that kids today are simply not learning enough mathematics, and not learning it deeply enough. Why has this problem proven so intractable?

A book review may shed new light on this question. The book itself, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, by Liping Ma, is a groundbreaking study that compares U.S. mathematics teachers to their counterparts in China. Ma's basic conclusion is that the Chinese teachers have a much deeper knowledge of the elementary mathematics topics they teach. They develop this knowledge through continual self-study, in which they deepen their own understanding of the topics they teach while also honing their lessons to perfection. In addition, the Chinese system allows for substantial interactions between teachers, resulting in a truly professional teaching corps that shares knowledge and ideas.

U.S. teachers, by contrast, usually are not prepared to for such self-study. The fragmentation of teacher education in the U.S. means that teachers typically do not get sufficiently deep exposure to fundamental mathematical principles. In addition, most U.S. school schedules put teachers at front of the classroom for so many hours a day that there is no time for teachers to reflect on the topics they are teaching or to polish their lessons.

The reviewer of the book, the noted mathematician Roger Howe of Yale University, discusses the importance of Ma's research and how it might influence U.S. educational policies in order to improve mathematics education. For example, Howe notes that class sizes in China are actually larger than in the U.S., and yet the Chinese teachers are more successful because of the depth of their understanding of the mathematical topics they are teaching and because they have more time to prepare their lessons. For this reason, Howe notes, funds currently being spent on the push to reduce class size might be better spent on improving and deepening U.S. teachers' knowledge of mathematics.

Howe's review of Ma's book, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, will appear in the September 1999 issue of the Notices of the AMS.