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	Mathematics as a Gateway to Student Success
	Dale Parnell
	Oregon State University

The study of mathematics stands, in many ways, as a gateway to student success in education. This is becoming particularly true as our society moves inexorably into the technological age. Therefore, it is vital that more students develop higher levels of competency in mathematics.¹

     The standards and expectations for students must be high, but that is only half of the equation. The more important half is the development of teaching techniques and methods that will help all students (rather than just some students) reach those higher expectations and standards. This will require some changes in how mathematics is taught.

     Effective education must give clear focus to connecting real life context with subject-matter content for the student, and this requires a more "connected" mathematics program. In many of today's classrooms, especially in secondary school and college, teaching is a matter of putting students in classrooms marked "English," "history," or "mathematics," and then attempting to fill their heads with facts through lectures, textbooks, and the like. Aside from an occasional lab, workbook, or "story problem," the element of contextual teaching and learning is absent, and little attempt is made to connect what students are learning with the world in which they will be expected to work and spend their lives. Often the fragmented information offered to students is of little use or application except to pass a test.

     What we do in most traditional classrooms is require students to commit bits of knowledge to memory in isolation from any practical application--to simply take our word that they "might need it later." For many students, "later" never arrives. This might well be called the freezer approach to teaching and learning. In effect, we are handing out information to our students and saying, "Just put this in your mental freezer; you can thaw it out later should you need it." With the exception of a minority of students who do well in mastering abstractions with little contextual experience, students aren't buying that offer. The neglected majority of students see little personal meaning in what they are asked to learn, and they just don't learn it.

     I recently had occasion to interview 75 students representing seven different high schools in the Northwest. In nearly all cases, the students were juniors identified as vocational or general education students. The comment of one student stands out as representative of what most of these students told me in one way or another: "I know it's up to me to get an education, but a lot of times school is just so dull and boring. . . . You go to this class, go to that class, study a little of this and a little of that, and nothing connects. . . . I would like to really understand and know the application for what I am learning." Time and again, students were asking, "Why do I have to learn this?" with few sensible answers coming from the teachers.

     My own long experience as a community college president confirms the thoughts of these students. In most community colleges today, one-third to one-half of the entering students are enrolled in developmental (remedial) education, trying to make up for what they did not learn in earlier education experiences. A large majority of these students come to the community college with limited mathematical skills and abilities that hardly go beyond adding, subtracting, and multiplying with whole numbers. In addition, the need for remediation is also experienced, in varying degrees, at four-year colleges and universities.

     What is the greatest sin committed in the teaching of mathematics today? It is the failure to help students use the magnificent power of the brain to make connections between the following:

• subject-matter content and the context of use;

• academic and vocational education;

• school and other life experiences;

• knowledge and application of knowledge; and

• one subject-matter discipline and another.

     Why is such failure so critical? Because understanding the idea of making the connection between subject-matter content and the context of application is what students, at all levels of education, desperately require to survive and succeed in our high-speed, high-challenge, rapidly changing world.

     Educational policy makers and leaders can issue reams of position papers on longer school days and years, site-based management, more achievement tests and better assessment practices, and other "hot" topics of the moment, but such papers alone will not make the crucial difference in what students know and can do. The difference will be made when classroom teachers begin to connect learning with real-life experiences in new, applied ways, and when education reformers begin to focus upon learning for meaning.

     A student may memorize formulas for determining surface area and measuring angles and use those formulas correctly on a test, thereby achieving the behavioral objectives set by the teacher. But when confronted with the need to construct a building or repair a car, the same student may well be left at sea because he or she hasn't made the connection between the formulas and their real-life application. When students are asked to consider the Pythagorean Theorem, why not make the lesson active, where students actually lay out the foundation for a small building like a storage shed?

     What a difference mathematics instruction could make for students if it were to stress the context of application--as well as the content of knowledge--using the problem-solving model over the freezer model. Teaching conducted upon the connected model would help more students learn with their thinking brain, as well as with their memory brain, developing the competencies and tools they need to survive and succeed in our complex, interconnected society.

     One step toward this goal is to develop mathematical tasks that integrate subject-matter content with the context of application and that are aimed at preparing individuals for the world of work as well as for postsecondary education. Since many mathematics teachers have had limited workplace experience, they need many good examples of how knowledge of mathematics can be applied to real life situations. The trick in developing mathematical tasks for use in classrooms will be to keep the tasks connected to real life situations that the student will recognize. The tasks should not be just a contrived exercise but should stay as close to solving common problems as possible.

     As an example, why not ask students to compute the cost of 12 years of schooling in a public school? It is a sad irony that after 12 years of schooling most students who attend the public schools have no idea of the cost of their schooling or how their education was financed. No wonder that some public schools have difficulty gaining financial support! The individuals being served by the schools have never been exposed to the real life context of who pays for the schools and why. Somewhere along the line in the teaching of mathematics, this real life learning opportunity has been missed, along with many other similar contextual examples.

     The mathematical tasks in High School Mathematics at Work provide students (and teachers) with a plethora of real life mathematics problems and challenges to be faced in everyday life and work. The challenge for teachers will be to develop these tasks so they relate as close as possible to where students live and work every day.

References

Parnell, D. (1985).

The neglected majority. Washington, DC: Community College Press.

Parnell, D. (1995).

Why do I have to learn this? Waco, TX: CORD Communications.

Note

¹ For further discussion of these issues, see Parnell (1985, 1995).

Dale Parnell is Professor Emeritus of the School of Education at Oregon State University. He has served as a University Professor, College President, and for ten years as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Association of Community Colleges. He has served as a consultant to the National Science Foundation and has served on many national commissions, such as the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS). He is the author of the book The Neglected Majority which provided the foundation for the federally-funded Tech Prep Associate Degree Program.