There is some good news for New Zealand. The achievement of our Year 5 students in science was significantly better than it was four years ago. Neither the Year 9 data for science nor mathematics at either year level have changed significantly since the last round of the study.
There is also some bad news. For one thing, we have some of the largest achievement gaps amongst the 64 participating countries, between children from affluent communities and those from disadvantaged ones. Only six out of the 64 had larger gaps than New Zealand.
We already knew we had a problem with our socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment. Just about every international study shows the same thing.
But the latest TIMSS data also contained an unpleasant surprise – a new gap has opened up between the achievement of boys and girls in maths. In the 2019 round, there was no gap between the sexes in either subject. But in the latest round, boys did significantly better in maths than girls.
It’s unusual to see educational gaps disfavouring girls in our educational data. In almost all measures of achievement, girls do better than boys.
Why the TIMSS gap in maths has appeared is something of a puzzle. But other results from the study may hold a clue.
TIMSS also measures reported classroom disorder. Children rate how often they are disturbed by disrupted conduct while they are trying to learn. On this measure, New Zealand was the fourth worst out of the 64 participating countries.
Perhaps girls are more sensitive to noise and disruption than boys. If that is the explanation, it’s no surprise that it affected their maths learning in particular.
Of all the subjects that children learn at school, maths requires the greatest concentration. Children’s short-term working memory is easily overloaded when learning mathematical processes. Noise occupies working memory resources that could otherwise be devoted to learning.
This is just a hypothesis, but one that would be worth investigating further. One thing is for sure, though. Children don’t learn well in noisy and disrupted classrooms. We urgently need to get that under control.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
We already knew we had a problem with our socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment. Just about every international study shows the same thing.
But the latest TIMSS data also contained an unpleasant surprise – a new gap has opened up between the achievement of boys and girls in maths. In the 2019 round, there was no gap between the sexes in either subject. But in the latest round, boys did significantly better in maths than girls.
It’s unusual to see educational gaps disfavouring girls in our educational data. In almost all measures of achievement, girls do better than boys.
Why the TIMSS gap in maths has appeared is something of a puzzle. But other results from the study may hold a clue.
TIMSS also measures reported classroom disorder. Children rate how often they are disturbed by disrupted conduct while they are trying to learn. On this measure, New Zealand was the fourth worst out of the 64 participating countries.
Perhaps girls are more sensitive to noise and disruption than boys. If that is the explanation, it’s no surprise that it affected their maths learning in particular.
Of all the subjects that children learn at school, maths requires the greatest concentration. Children’s short-term working memory is easily overloaded when learning mathematical processes. Noise occupies working memory resources that could otherwise be devoted to learning.
This is just a hypothesis, but one that would be worth investigating further. One thing is for sure, though. Children don’t learn well in noisy and disrupted classrooms. We urgently need to get that under control.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
5 comments:
Could the problem be the amount of time spent on social media?!
And this is with an average participation rate that’s recently risen to 56% (which is considered “good” !)
What would the situation be like if we had 90%+ classroom attendance??!? (Which I would consider “good”)
the test obviously didnt include gurlz math - they would have aced it
Is the absenteeism problem worse for boys than for girls? If so that might skew the male sample towards the more able ones and thereby artificially raise the average performance of boys.
Traditionally boys have always achieved better in maths but after about year 10 on wards, , girls caught up . As a maths tutor girls , I observed ,frequently had the belief that you innately had maths ability or you didn't. Perhaps the way some students could learn to read effortlessly and acquired phonic skills naturally and intrinsically while very many others in reality need explicit, systematic phonic instruction . Without this kind of instruction a student could think it was not worth trying at maths because that was going to be fruitless. Similarly these who are apparently less 'gifted 'need the same intensive explicit instruction in maths as is now advocated in reading .
The large socio-economic gap we have is so shameful. It ought to be seen as the major determiner for a change in teaching methods and condemnation of the prevailing progressive ideology . As long as progressivism is allowed to to blame home environments for this gap , instead of recognizing their ideology is at fault things will never change for the better. I will mention , yet again the Scottish Clackmannanshire and Dumbartonshire research that had low decile children achieving as well as higher decile children with just changes in teaching - back to structured approaches. last century with more traditional teaching methods we did not have this ugly gap .
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