Reported in the Dallas Morning News, Texas high-school students have improved their math SAT scores this year, but have slipped back in reading and writing.
This is great news. Every teacher knows the foundations for literacy and numeracy are laid down in elementary school.
…And, naturally, the piece focuses on recent research into the effectiveness of math education.
The Economist blog title is a little misleading - it’s more about how to boost the wealth and quality of life of students with some additional math teaching. The effect was most pronounced in African-American boys.
TAKING more maths in school can make you richer, and not just because it helps you follow the stockmarket. A paper by Joshua Goodman, an economist, measures the impact of learning maths on income. He looked at a change in American schools following the 1983 “Nation at Risk” report. That study revealed that American students often follow a less rigorous curriculum than students in other countries. The result was new maths and reading requirements.
Mr Goodman has found that each extra required maths course raised the annual income of black males by 15%. (More reading classes had a negative or no effect on earnings.) More maths also increased the likelihood of young black men going to university and someday having a job requiring quantitative skills.
Check it out, or find out more about the math tutoring we provide - tutoring that, if Goodman’s findings hold true, could make your child wealthier and more secure in adult life.
Excuse the awful pun, but a post from Deb’s Math blog (new arrival in the Whizz blogroll, at right) pointed out the vogue for decent statisticians and mathematicians in the top companies.
“Robust, unbiased data are the first step toward addressing our long-term economic needs and key policy priorities,”
This is no bad thing, and his attitude reflects the need at corporations to have expert number-crunchers on board. As Carrie Grimes, a statistics expert and analyst at Google, points out:
“Even an improvement of a percent or two can be huge, when you do things over the millions and billions of times we do things at Google,”
At a somewhat smaller level, we’ve found the benefits in good statistical analysis of the behavior of our tens of thousands of Math-Whizz students. Some of this research is summarized on our Math-Whizz Research Page.
In any case, we’d hope that our online math tutor can help get children started with elementary statistics in particular, and math in general.
Stats is one of the subjects that most commonly trips up adults, and knowing good from bad statistics is important for weeding out honest information from that which has been expelled from the fundament of a particular male bovineruminant.
The combination of Lego, the obsession of this writer’s early years, and math, the preoccupation of his working days, means there IS ONLY ONE GIFT that I will consider this year - the Lego Calculator. (via Rex - site not always suitable for minors).
We suggest young, aspiring mathematicians everywhere do the following:
- Buy Lego to build whole new worlds out of plastic bricks;
- Subscribe to Math-Whizz to learn the most important skills you’ll ever need;
- Use your ‘Building Blocks Calculator‘ to calculate the trajectory of your Mars rocket when you’re a top-notch scientist and pioneering astronaut in twenty-five years’ time.
