Disputes over history and phonics have taken much of the attention during the debate over Australia’s proposed new national curriculum, but the teaching of maths has also split the profession and divided some states from the Commonwealth.
Rote memorisation can only take a student’s knowledge so far, Mr Chapman said, after which point a student must apply their knowledge to a broader set of real-life examples. A good system of teaching maths draws on both methods. Greg Ashman says students are paying the price for the modern obsession with inquiry-based learning techniques in the mathematics curriculum.But another leading international study, TIMSS, showed improved performances in maths among Australian year 8 students and put Australia equal seventh among 39 participating nations.
But independent school Ballarat Clarendon College takes an explicit approach to teaching maths and numeracy from prep right through to VCE. The school’s head of research, Greg Ashman, argues that an inquiry-based approach risks causing cognitive overload, confusion, and ultimately even a dislike of maths.
“Every graduate teacher that we interview thinks that explicit teaching is bad and inquiry learning is good,” he says. “All the stuff that comes from university faculties of education, from professional development, pushes people towards some kind of inquiry style of learning, the view that kids learn best by figuring things out for themselves.”