The results of the latest international assessment on students’ skills in mathematics are out – and it’s not looking good for Kiwi kids.
New Zealand students recorded their worst ever results in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) exams, with the average student dropping up to 15 points in maths.
And it’s not a one-off. New Zealand’s achievement in mathematics has plateaued for the past two decades.
We spoke to a number of education experts to find out why.
Michael Johnston, a senior researcher at the NZ InitiativeInstitute, said the Pisa results were disappointing but not surprising: “We were world leading and now we are mediocre.”
He believes the gradual decline in mathematics results is down to teachers using “ineffective methods”, such as those introduced in the numeracy project.
“Instead of learning a lot of basic knowledge like times tables and addition, young children are exposed to a range of what they call strategies, different ways of working out problems.
“The trouble with that is that it is before they’ve got the basic facts under their belts,” he said.
Johnston argues that teachers should be taking the reins more and leading learning, rather than using other student-centred approaches, which he said are driven by ideology.
Our slow drop in maths performance? Johnston argues that it’s down to a phase out of more traditional mathematics teaching.
“Even though this ideology came into place by the 1990s, there really was a legacy of older teachers who had a more traditional way of doing things.
“And as they’ve retired, I think that things have got less and less structured in classrooms,” he said.
Vicktoria Johnson/Stuff
New Zealand students recorded their worst ever results in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment exams, with the average student dropping up to 15 points in maths.
Lisa Darragh, senior lecturer in mathematics education at the University of Auckland, disagrees.
“Initial teacher education is not ideologically driven,” she said. “It is absolutely evidence-based. Everything that we are delivering about the best way of teaching mathematics is drawn from research.”
Darragh said pitting teacher-led learning, called explicit instruction, against student-led learning was creating “politics out of maths instruction”.
“It’s interesting to me that people are trying to make a divide between explicit versus other kinds of teaching… when actually there’s evidence for all of them.”
Instead, Darragh argues that the plateau in achievement has been largely driven by grouping children by ability in primary school, which became common place around 20 years ago.
“There’s quite a huge amount of international research that suggests ability group tends to exacerbate the inequalities that are already existing.
“The students who were put in those top groups end up doing better and better, whereas the students who were put in the bottom groups just have less opportunities to learn,” she said.
In the Pisa results, New Zealand had a large gap in achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged students.
The drop in Pisa maths scores from 2018 to 2022 occurred mainly at the lower end of the distribution, with disadvantaged students falling the most.
“Often those children who are already marginalised in our society are disproportionately placed into those bottom groups,” Darragh said. “That becomes an equity issue.”
