Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
My kids learned these in 6th and 7th grade. But sure, it wasn’t the classes 6-7 years before college, it was only the ones 2-3 years ago…
Yeah the timing doesn’t work out for this to be pandemic related. These students would have been struggling with basic math in the middle of high school before the pandemic even started.
I took a semester off math in college and it was a huge mistake, the year off most kids had resulted in a huge backslide. It’s also important to remember that even pre pandemic the majority of kids weren’t competent in math to start with.
At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents.
Don’t they teach fractions in junior high or elementary school? Kids that age during the pandemic aren’t in college yet.
I tutored math for a number of people. One of my pupils was a real problem case. He was attending a kind of specialized high school equivalent in my country, basically a vocational training plus ability to attend university later with a subject close to his training. This guy wanted to go into chemistry. If there is one area in STEM where you need fractions day in and day out, it’s chemistry. And this guy had serious problems grasping the very concept of it. Having problems with fractions + chemistry is a dangerous and possible explosive mix. Luckily for humanity, he later went into a different branch of jobs.
And this guy had serious problems grasping the very concept of it.
It’s literally just division. Like, even if you add variables, it’s still just division.
Fractions and decimals are where the vast majority of Americans start having trouble with math. I don’t remember learning them, but as a student teacher I did notice that the textbooks circa 2000 were teaching decimals and fractions weird. Unfortunately math is one of those things that if you don’t understand one part, you won’t get the rest cause it builds on itself. I left teaching before I even graduated college, for many reasons that have nothing to do with teaching, so I don’t know how to fix the issue. I’m just aware of it, so anyone in my adult life that complains that they just “aren’t good at math,” I will suggest that fractions and decimals are what they don’t understand, and 90% of the time they agree with me, and realize that they don’t actually suck at math.
I think people are bad at fractions and decimals because they are bad at division. My brain isn’t “normal” though, so I don’t know if I understand how “normal” people think. I “get” math.
The question isn’t if fractions are taught. The question is why aren’t people retaining it while they are there.
My high school didn’t need a pandemic to fuck over kids in math. We were in some kind of pilot program for a new math curriculum that was complete dog shit and design for people who weren’t planning to go to college or have to do any higher level math.
The physic teacher quit over it, because the kids would come to physics classes, which needed math, and they couldn’t do the math. When he tried to have them do actual math the parents went after him.
When I was a senior I was sitting next to a kid who was in National Math Honors Society and watching him put 1-1 in his calculator to solve a problem. He was not trying to be funny or ironic, this was the dependence the school created on calculators.
It’s been 20 years and I’m still pissed off about it. Math was my best subject until that horse shit basically stopped teaching me math.
I took the SAT the first year they had calculators and no one told me, but I was still able to do enough in my head and on paper to get an okay score. I probably would have gotten a higher score if I could have checked my work with a calculator, but I doubt kids today would even be able to do what I did.
When I went in to take a chemistry placement test for college all the kids had their calculators out. Then the people giving the test said it was 45 questions in 45 minutes, no calculators. The groans and sound of 200-300 people putting their calculators away is something I’ll never forget.
After about 2 questions I realized I’d never finish in time. I completely stopped doing math and simply picked the answer with the correct number of significant figures. I never saw the actual grading of the test, but I placed into the higher level chem class as a result.
They’re blaming the pandemic which caused lockdowns for a couple of years for college students struggling with fractions and exponents? This is math that is supposed to be learned before high school. I don’t think the pandemic is to blame for this.
I don’t think the pandemic is to blame for this.
It’s not. It has been a problem for years.
Yeah… I started college back in 2013 and had a roommate that didn’t know order of operations…
I think we’re failing trying to focus too much on quantity over quality. There were tricks I didn’t learn until college that someone should’ve taught me years ago. Things my parents learned that stayed with them for decades nobody ever bothered to tell me, and occasionally either they or someone from their generation would just say something like “9 * something adds up to 9 (e.g.
9 * 5 = 45,4 + 5 = 9)”, “move the decimal place and multiply by two to calculate the tip”, “i before e except after c.”But nope, didn’t learn that, instead I “learned” 3 different ways to do the same thing for solving various algebra situations and at 28 remember none of them. I feel very sorry for the common core kids, I expect them to retain even less with common core’s embrace of this approach. Teaching people multiple ways to do something is great, but ultimately the teacher is going to use one, and they’re going to move too fast for you to translate “their way” into “your way” (at least that was my experience in high school math when I tried to do it a way different than what the teacher was teaching).
It is 100% the fault of educators. Actual mathematicians have derided the abysmal state of math education for literal decades. But they don’t get to decide how we “educate” children. US educators unabashedly focus exclusively on testing for funding. They don’t give a rats ass if you know the simplest amount of trivial math—they do really really care if you pass a bizarrely arbitrary arithmetic test though. Why do think those mini-viral bullshit PEMDAS/BEMDAS memes track on Reddit. It’s deranged math students that think an order of operations is actually used in real math (real shock: they aren’t, mathematics doesn’t have an order of operations).
Also an entire education system that does its best to be bad at making math interesting.
Yep. I’ve always been bad at math, I still am, but at least college math was interesting even though I didn’t get it very well.
Go back and really understand fraction and decimal conversion. I’ll bet if you do that, the higher levels will make a lot more sense. That’s where most people get lost.
It also helps to understand that math isn’t just moving numbers around. There’s a lot of that going on, but it is essentially a language that at the higher levels can be used to describe anything, even stuff we haven’t bothered inventing yet. Boole died “knowing” he invented a branch of mathematics that would never have any practical applications in the real world. We based all of computer science on it.
the pandemic was three years ago. If these people are getting into college now, they had to have learned that stuff prior to the pandemic
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The hardest maths are usually in their junior or senior year in high school. It’s reasonable to believe that if they weren’t challenged to make the connections it didn’t stick. Just because they learned the fundamentals doesn’t mean they went and manipulated them in the manner they need to be familiar with for higher learning.
But it says they are struggling with fractions and exponents, don’t those get taught earlier on?
The don’t say how they are struggling. It could be inside more complex equations. Or conversions.
Math is fucking boring and we have way more things to do now versus decades ago when solving math problems could be entertaining.
We also have tools to do the computation for us. It makes more sense for people to focus on theory and application over calculations.
That’d be like trying to learn about basketball strategy without putting in the fundamental time shooting and defending.
Sure, coaches operate on a higher level and don’t have their hands on the ball as often as players do, but they definitely know how to play. Would you hire a coach that didn’t?
No, it wouldn’t be. Basketball and mathematics are different. Try to stay on topic instead of resorting to analogies. It just shows that you can’t argue your position effectively, so you have to derail to something that makes more sense to you.
Unfortunately, now we end up debating the accuracy of your analogy instead of the actual topic at hand. Great tactic, but I’m not going to engage in it.
Let me know when you want to stay on topic.
It’s not really an analogy b/c I’m referring to how brains learn in general for any subject, whether math or basketball.
Yes, we don’t need to memorize all those old mental math tricks used before calculators were invented, but you still need to understand exponentiation, which follows from multiplication, which follows from putting time in to practice the basic times tables.
Yes, but do you need to know how to solve them? I’d say that’s fine stuff for reviewing, as long as you understand the concepts behind them.
For example, it would be totally understandable for STEM college students to not know how to solve 1/42/3 without review. It’s just realistic and doesn’t mean they are ill-prepared. If anything, we should be teaching students that they should get used to reviewing things instead of assuming they already know.
I think so, to an academic (not necessarily a professional) level, because how could one reach a conceptual understanding without?
It’s like the professors that allow open book tests. If you’ve practiced solving before, it’ll be quick and easy to recall deep knowledge and expand on it. If you haven’t practiced solving and don’t really understand the concepts, you won’t perform well enough in time.
Try to stay on topic instead of resorting to analogies.
Failure to comprehend abstraction while arguing against math education. Yep, that checks out.
🥱
Lol, you completely ignore the “now we end up debating the accuracy of your analogy instead of the actual topic at hand” part of it.
Why are people like you incapable of seeing the bigger picture? Lol.
Doing accurate math in embedded systems is very important.
Sure but, what if you’re not working in embedded systems?
That’s what these people fail to grasp. Just because higher level math is relevant to them, therefore it should be relevant to everyone else.
Lol. I’m glad I rose above the ‘math is super important’ rhetoric and learned to think for myself. It’s a shame most of you didn’t.
This is an extremely stupid take. You don’t have to enjoy math to understand fundamental concepts of it and even if you hate it you can’t avoid the need for it in your life.
Yeah, you don’t have to enjoy anything to understand it.
I’m talking about the level of math people need in their lives.
Basix fractions are needed. Even just to understand ratios, compound interest or to calculate repayment plans.
Let’s try with a real life (but slightly simplified) math example taken from my mostly innumerate coworkers.
Problem:
2.5 + 2.5 = ?Many will answer “5”
My coworkers won’t type 4 extra keystrokes into their calculator, so they follow the written rounding rules (which shouldn’t apply here) and key in 3 + 3 = 6. Six. It’s six every time.
And they will argue it to the fucking death.
This is the depth of the problem. They have the tools to avoid doing math “in their head” and use their amazing modern tools but no conceptual understanding of the fundamental principles that will bring them from “2.5 is the same as 3 because I learned rounding!” to “there’s a fundamental difference between 2.5 and 3 if you’re trying to add them.” They just never came to that breakthrough understanding because no one taught them.
Sounds like a very specific case that I don’t see in the real world.
Not saying it doesn’t happen, but just because it happened to you doesn’t mean it’s a widespread problem.
Everyone I know, especially in a work setting, wouldn’t ‘round because they don’t want to type.’ Lol. That sounds like a shitty employee who has bigger problems than math.
you’re missing the forest due to the single example being given; kind of like their coworker missing the point about rounding. the lack of the fundamental understanding of mathematics is leading to this person making a mistake repeatedly and their insistence that they followed the rules (which they don’t actually understand don’t apply here) leads to confidently incorrect answers. these types of behaviors will show up repeatedly in many contexts.
Lol. I’m tired of explaining things to ya’ll.
Keep living in your own, neurodivergent bubble. You were going to anyways.
its amusing how you can’t realize you’re demonstrating the same behavior as the coworker.
It’s amazing how you don’t understand survivor bias, lol.
sports and factories ain’t need no math by god! USA! we got to the moon first everyone else gets our sloppy seconds MURICA! Jesus didn’t heal with fractions
living in the us is like watching Rome burning albeit slowly
Don’t these colleges have any admissions standards? What’s going on that they’re admitting these idiots?
Well it turns out that the SAT and College Admissions/grades are all on a curve. Hell, even real life is relatively on a curve.
So, Idiocracy was a prescient documentary.
They need money.
Are they sure it’s pandemic? And not just a new product of the good ‘ol American education system?
I tutor college students. While many students struggled with math before the pandemic, the fallout from the changes made during the pandemic made these deficiencies so much worse.
It could be long covid for some too, foggy brain probably wouldn’t help.
It could be but the reality is that the educational system by and large bungled the transition from in person to online classes. The quality of education during that time was severely compromised.
How are they getting into college? I guess colleges are accepting lower standards to keep money flowing?
Otherwise wouldn’t the students just do terribly on the math section of the SAT/ACT and just be denied entry?
Sounds like that is what accredited Universities should be required to do if so. If you haven’t learned the prerequisites there is no reason to be acting like they should be there.
As for math, something that Ive noticed over and over again is that if students are explicitly told to solve a specific math problem eg. 145 × 306 = ? they can generally do that but if you give them a problem that requires them to know when to multiply, divide, add, subtract etc. they struggle. They also struggle in finding systems that are analogous to one another and use the same math. eg. limiting reagents and cooking. i.e what do you run out of first? how much stuff can be made given what you have? They can do that for things theyre familiar with but they cant do the exact same type of problem with molecules instead of say… apples and oranges. That kind of weakness wont be caught in their grades or SAT/ACT problems unless they rely heavily on those type of problems which they dont. And its also something that is harder to teach and easier to fall through the cracks during a pandemic.
AND on top of that, online classes are harder to control the use of resources that they shouldnt be using and was arguably not as well prepped and planned for. Teachers simply were not prepared to teach remotely and in some cases eg. labs, you cant really effectively teach the same thing remotely as in person.
Is this what you mean they couldn’t answer? Or are you saying would just be hard to submit answers online?
Denote the methods used and how many of each item can be made in the following baking situations:
Ed has: 4 dozen eggs (thank god prices came down some so he didnt get robbed), 5lbs of sugar, 12lbs of flour, and 5 gallons water.
Item 1 requires: 2 eggs 1lb sugar 2lbs flour
Item 2 requires: 1 egg, 4oz sugar, 300oz flour
Item 3 requires: 500ml water, 250g sugar, 350g flour
The situations I am talking about are things like: “You have 6 pounds of flour, 6 pounds of sugar and 12 eggs. Each cake requires 2 pounds of flour, 4 eggs and 1 pound of sugar to make. How many cakes can be made? What ingredient if any, is left over? How much of that ingredient is left over if any?”
Or being able to work in units of pounds but not grams. They struggle with generalizing what they know. i.e its brittle knowledge. They know how to press buttons but not why
Gotcha, that was my intent of making item 1 easy without conversions. Then 2 conversions, then 3 conversions to metric. Thanks for spending the time to type that out for me. It helps me get a better grasp of it. : ) Hope you have a great day
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“It’s not just that they’re unprepared, they’re almost damaged,” said Brian Rider, Temple’s math chair. “I hate to use that term, but they’re so behind.”
It’s as if there was a highly-infectious pandemic that’s known to damage most organs of the body, including the brain
Or maybe the scientists and doctors that said shutting down schools was terrible for development, were actually on to something.
That doesn’t track. Only thing school did was make us spend less time sleeping. Pandemic shutdown was actually a blessing for many overworked people.
And it was awful for students who basically weren’t taught for a year. We are now seeing the results of those policies in lower test scores and competency in basically every subject. This was entirely predicted by people who care about child development.
Yeah, let’s have more dead people. That would be better than kids having a worse schooling experience for a year. Absolutely.
I kind of feel bad for thinking this way, but regardless of whose fault it is, if you don’t understand fractions you should not be pursuing a STEM degree.
What constitutes ‘understanding fractions’ in your mind?
Not “struggling to grasp” them, as the article (or at least the summary) phrases it.
The pandemic made everything worse, but students struggled with math as long as I have been alive. As someone who loved science and math stuff outside school, but hated it with a passion in school, this text really put my thoughts into words as to why :
Lockhart’s Lament: https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
TLDR: It is taught wrong.
I love this lament.
As a dad constantly frustrated with the shittiness of my kids’ math curriculum: thanks, this is wonderful, puts to words a lot of what I’ve been feeling and more.
I struggled with certain math concepts that I should have learned in high school because my school district had low expectations and failed to prepare me for college math. I also was unprepared for grad school math because undergrad failed to prepare me cause it was so dumbed down. This has been a fundamental issue for a long time. All of this was over a decade ago.
They’re called weedout classes, and they’re designed to be hard.
