Range - David Epstein Page 0,32

says, “K of eight,” a third tries. The teacher is kind and encouraging even if they don’t manage to toss out the right answer. “It’s okay,” she says, “you’re thinking.” The problem, though, is the way in which they are thinking.

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That was one American class period out of hundreds in the United States, Asia, and Europe that were filmed and analyzed in an effort to understand effective math teaching. Needless to say, classrooms were very different. In the Netherlands, students regularly trickled into class late, and spent a lot of class time working on their own. In Hong Kong, class looked pretty similar to the United States: lectures rather than individual work filled most of the time. Some countries used a lot of problems in real-world contexts, others relied more on symbolic math. Some classes kept kids in their seats, others had them approach the blackboard. Some teachers were very energetic, others staid. The litany of differences was long, but not one of those features was associated with differences in student achievement across countries. There were similarities too. In every classroom in every country, teachers relied on two main types of questions.

The more common were “using procedures” questions: basically, practice at something that was just learned. For instance, take the formula for the sum of the interior angles of a polygon (180 × (number of polygon sides − 2)), and apply it to polygons on a worksheet. The other common variety was “making connections” questions, which connected students to a broader concept, rather than just a procedure. That was more like when the teacher asked students why the formula works, or made them try to figure out if it works for absolutely any polygon from a triangle to an octagon. Both types of questions are useful and both were posed by teachers in every classroom in every country studied. But an important difference emerged in what teachers did after they asked a making-connections problem.

Rather than letting students grapple with some confusion, teachers often responded to their solicitations with hint-giving that morphed a making-connections problem into a using-procedures one. That is exactly what the charismatic teacher in the American classroom was doing. Lindsey Richland, a University of Chicago professor who studies learning, watched that video with me, and told me that when the students were playing multiple choice with the teacher, “what they’re actually doing is seeking rules.” They were trying to turn a conceptual problem they didn’t understand into a procedural one they could just execute. “We’re very good, humans are, at trying to do the least amount of work that we have to in order to accomplish a task,” Richland told me. Soliciting hints toward a solution is both clever and expedient. The problem is that when it comes to learning concepts that can be broadly wielded, expedience can backfire.

In the United States, about one-fifth of questions posed to students began as making-connections problems. But by the time the students were done soliciting hints from the teacher and solving the problems, a grand total of zero percent remained making-connections problems. Making-connections problems did not survive the teacher-student interactions.

Teachers in every country fell into the same trap at times, but in the higher-performing countries plenty of making-connections problems remained that way as the class struggled to figure them out. In Japan, a little more than half of all problems were making-connections problems, and half of those stayed that way through the solving. An entire class period could be just one problem with many parts. When a student offered an idea for how to approach a problem, rather than engaging in multiple choice, the teacher had them come to the board and put a magnet with their name on it next to the idea. By the end of class, one problem on a blackboard the size of an entire wall served as a captain’s log of the class’s collective intellectual voyage, dead ends and all. Richland originally tried to label the videotaped lessons with a single topic of the day, “but we couldn’t do it with Japan,” she said, “because you could engage with these problems using so much different content.” (There is a specific Japanese word to describe chalkboard writing that tracks conceptual connections over the course of collective problem solving: bansho.)

Just as it is in golf, procedure practice is important in math. But when it comprises the entire math training strategy, it’s a problem. “Students do not view mathematics as a system,” Richland and