Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
Are they sure it’s pandemic? And not just a new product of the good ‘ol American education system?
I tutor college students. While many students struggled with math before the pandemic, the fallout from the changes made during the pandemic made these deficiencies so much worse.
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It could be but the reality is that the educational system by and large bungled the transition from in person to online classes. The quality of education during that time was severely compromised.
How are they getting into college? I guess colleges are accepting lower standards to keep money flowing?
Otherwise wouldn’t the students just do terribly on the math section of the SAT/ACT and just be denied entry?
Sounds like that is what accredited Universities should be required to do if so. If you haven’t learned the prerequisites there is no reason to be acting like they should be there.
As for math, something that Ive noticed over and over again is that if students are explicitly told to solve a specific math problem eg. 145 × 306 = ? they can generally do that but if you give them a problem that requires them to know when to multiply, divide, add, subtract etc. they struggle. They also struggle in finding systems that are analogous to one another and use the same math. eg. limiting reagents and cooking. i.e what do you run out of first? how much stuff can be made given what you have? They can do that for things theyre familiar with but they cant do the exact same type of problem with molecules instead of say… apples and oranges. That kind of weakness wont be caught in their grades or SAT/ACT problems unless they rely heavily on those type of problems which they dont. And its also something that is harder to teach and easier to fall through the cracks during a pandemic.
AND on top of that, online classes are harder to control the use of resources that they shouldnt be using and was arguably not as well prepped and planned for. Teachers simply were not prepared to teach remotely and in some cases eg. labs, you cant really effectively teach the same thing remotely as in person.
Is this what you mean they couldn’t answer? Or are you saying would just be hard to submit answers online?
Denote the methods used and how many of each item can be made in the following baking situations:
Ed has: 4 dozen eggs (thank god prices came down some so he didnt get robbed), 5lbs of sugar, 12lbs of flour, and 5 gallons water.
Item 1 requires: 2 eggs 1lb sugar 2lbs flour
Item 2 requires: 1 egg, 4oz sugar, 300oz flour
Item 3 requires: 500ml water, 250g sugar, 350g flour
The situations I am talking about are things like: “You have 6 pounds of flour, 6 pounds of sugar and 12 eggs. Each cake requires 2 pounds of flour, 4 eggs and 1 pound of sugar to make. How many cakes can be made? What ingredient if any, is left over? How much of that ingredient is left over if any?”
Or being able to work in units of pounds but not grams. They struggle with generalizing what they know. i.e its brittle knowledge. They know how to press buttons but not why
Gotcha, that was my intent of making item 1 easy without conversions. Then 2 conversions, then 3 conversions to metric. Thanks for spending the time to type that out for me. It helps me get a better grasp of it. : ) Hope you have a great day
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I took the SAT the first year they had calculators and no one told me, but I was still able to do enough in my head and on paper to get an okay score. I probably would have gotten a higher score if I could have checked my work with a calculator, but I doubt kids today would even be able to do what I did.
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I tutored math for a number of people. One of my pupils was a real problem case. He was attending a kind of specialized high school equivalent in my country, basically a vocational training plus ability to attend university later with a subject close to his training. This guy wanted to go into chemistry. If there is one area in STEM where you need fractions day in and day out, it’s chemistry. And this guy had serious problems grasping the very concept of it. Having problems with fractions + chemistry is a dangerous and possible explosive mix. Luckily for humanity, he later went into a different branch of jobs.
And this guy had serious problems grasping the very concept of it.
It’s literally just division. Like, even if you add variables, it’s still just division.
Fractions and decimals are where the vast majority of Americans start having trouble with math. I don’t remember learning them, but as a student teacher I did notice that the textbooks circa 2000 were teaching decimals and fractions weird. Unfortunately math is one of those things that if you don’t understand one part, you won’t get the rest cause it builds on itself. I left teaching before I even graduated college, for many reasons that have nothing to do with teaching, so I don’t know how to fix the issue. I’m just aware of it, so anyone in my adult life that complains that they just “aren’t good at math,” I will suggest that fractions and decimals are what they don’t understand, and 90% of the time they agree with me, and realize that they don’t actually suck at math.
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They’re blaming the pandemic which caused lockdowns for a couple of years for college students struggling with fractions and exponents? This is math that is supposed to be learned before high school. I don’t think the pandemic is to blame for this.
Also an entire education system that does its best to be bad at making math interesting.
Yep. I’ve always been bad at math, I still am, but at least college math was interesting even though I didn’t get it very well.
Go back and really understand fraction and decimal conversion. I’ll bet if you do that, the higher levels will make a lot more sense. That’s where most people get lost.
It also helps to understand that math isn’t just moving numbers around. There’s a lot of that going on, but it is essentially a language that at the higher levels can be used to describe anything, even stuff we haven’t bothered inventing yet. Boole died “knowing” he invented a branch of mathematics that would never have any practical applications in the real world. We based all of computer science on it.
I struggled with certain math concepts that I should have learned in high school because my school district had low expectations and failed to prepare me for college math. I also was unprepared for grad school math because undergrad failed to prepare me cause it was so dumbed down. This has been a fundamental issue for a long time. All of this was over a decade ago.
They’re called weedout classes, and they’re designed to be hard.
I kind of feel bad for thinking this way, but regardless of whose fault it is, if you don’t understand fractions you should not be pursuing a STEM degree.
My kids learned these in 6th and 7th grade. But sure, it wasn’t the classes 6-7 years before college, it was only the ones 2-3 years ago…
Math was a big issue for me, and all the colleges in CA were shutting down any math classes lower than college algebra. I barely made it into the beginning and intermediate algebra classes before they shut them down.
What they do now if funnel all the students who don’t test into college algebra into “college math topics” which is an array of real-life mathematics that you’d come scross, like voting types and loans/interest rates. Which is a good thing to have as a class, but wouldn’t have helped me get my degree in drafting.
It’s a real good thing khan academy exsists.
sports and factories ain’t need no math by god! USA! we got to the moon first everyone else gets our sloppy seconds MURICA! Jesus didn’t heal with fractions
living in the us is like watching Rome burning albeit slowly
I had to student teach secondary mathematics in october of 2020.
My host teacher was very up-to-date on online learning platforms (like pear deck and desmos) so i got to teach while learning these programs and making lessons with someone very knowledgeable with this. We also had 30% IEP students but also had a special education teacher so that helped a lot as well.
But otherwise most of the teachers were unprepared to teach themselves.
If you used manipulatives which i deem necessary to visualize fractions you were out of luck :(
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