Grattan Institute report: Aussie students failing numeracy tests because of ‘faddish & unproven’ teaching

Too many Australian students are missing out on core maths skills because lots of primary schools rely on “faddish” maths teaching methods and fail to carve out enough time for the subject.

A damning report from Melbourne think-tank the Grattan Institute calls for more time to be devoted to maths lessons and better training and guidance for teachers to boost students’ results.

The report said Australia “has a maths problem”, with one in three students failing to attain key benchmarks in NAPLAN numeracy tests.

Recent international tests revealed that only 13 per cent of Year 4 students excelled at maths, compared with 22 per cent of English children and 49 per cent in Singapore.

The report suggests schools should allocate at least one hour a day to maths and encourage children to practice times tables or other maths facts for four minutes every day.

“Maths has been deprioritised in Australia for decades,” lead author and Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter said.

“Governments have been too slow to rule out faddish but unproven maths teaching methods.”

A survey of 1745 teachers conducted for the report found one in four lacked the confidence to teach Year 6 maths and one third reported maths was given less than an hour a day at their school.

Grattan senior associate Daniel Petrie said maths was essential for daily life and children who struggled with it were likely to have poorer job prospects.

“Maths is a super-hierarchical subject and it’s really important to build solid foundations when they’re young,” he said. “Once they start to fall behind it’s very hard to catch up. Schools need to be taking a really systematic approach to maths teaching.”

The report found huge differences in how maths was taught, with “games and maths-lite activities” too often the driving focus of a lesson.

It urged schools and governments to promote evidence-based teaching methods, based on understanding how children transfer knowledge from their short-term working memory into long-term memory.

This included breaking down new concepts into small chunks, explaining them clearly with examples and giving students time to practice.

Mr Petrie said the report was not pushing a back-to-basics approach, though aspects such as practising skills until they were automatic may seem familiar to older generations.

“It is true there are some facts in maths, like times tables or sums that add to 20 — if you can memorise those things, there’s a lot of evidence that just makes all the other parts of maths a lot easier,” he said.

“But what we’re proposing isn’t this stereotypical idea of the teacher standing up at the front with chalk and talk. It’s really dynamic and responsive to what the students are learning.”