1y ago

College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic

apnews.com College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic

U.S. colleges are searching for solutions as they see alarming numbers of students arrive with gaps in their math skills.

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.

106 comments

HS math teacher here. A lot of these problems existed prior to the pandemic. Parents making excuses for kids. Teachers making excuses for kids to keep parents and admin off their backs. Kids too reliant on calculators to develop "number-sense". Parents perpetuating the myth of the "math gene" they don't have because they failed at the "new math " of the 1970s, etc. The list goes on and on. The whole thing where ELA/Social Studies/History/etc. teachers are struggling with AI like ChatGPT? We went through that when Photomath and the like were released. The shortcuts you take in math WILL catch up with you.
That being said, maturity plays a HUGE part. A dedicated math student will struggle, but won't take shortcuts. They are better for it. The only thing that has changed is that shortcuts are much easier to take and are much more readily available. I cannot count how many shortcuts I took as a teenager, only to realize later that I F$#@! up long-term with my learning journey. Just look at any community college. Students that were "bad at math" suddenly have the realization that if they put in the effort, then the intellectual and/or GPA dividends will pay off in spades.
- I'm a firm believer that a not insignificant portion of people had one or two really shit math teachers at some point, decided that they're bad at math because of it, and then proceeded to just give up. Very often it was specifically related to fractions.
  The math professors at my uni were fantastic, and I saw many friends who always thought they were bad at math have lightbulb moments where something finally clicks.
  
  So, like personally, all of my math teachers taught math as a goal in itself. Which is incredibly un-interesting. It’s taught like a chore.
  Which is an incredible disservice.
  
  I can completely understand that perspective. However, some students are just not mature enough to handle every type of math thrown at them when it is. One "bad" teacher can ruin any subject. Some students just aren't "ready" when the curriculum (or other powers that be) decides that they should be.
  
  One of my high school teachers, when asked what the relevance of some maths concept was to the real world, threw a literal tantrum about how all of school is bullshit and you don't need to read Shakespeare to get a job so how dare you ask that? He would also yell at us when he made a mistake on the whiteboard and nobody noticed. I don't know what compelled this washed up boomer with the emotional maturity of a toddler to teach.
  
  Do you ever think a lot of people just don't care about math because it isn't relevant to their every day lives?
  Math is kind of this thing that we patronizingly tell children is so important and force them to learn. Many of them then go home and realize math, unlike reading, doesn't actually matter for most people past the elementary school level. It really doesn't.
- I was told by one of my kids teachers that teaching my second grader to carry the one was wrong.
  Also they were basically doing algebra in the beginnging just not using letters. Ie: 1 + __ = 9 , fill in the blank. So I taught my kids to just put x in the blank part and solve for x. Teacher said I was teaching them bad habits.
  I am still flabbergasted. My kid is not a math wiz to this day, but I’m pretty sure the strategies im teaching them are the only things getting them by. I’ve taken to teaching them dice games like 10,000/Farkle and making them keep score.
- I still continue to cheat/take shortcuts because I need to ensure I pass because if I don't, I wasted thousands of dollars. If I had the luxury of actually learning rather than performing well on tests, I could have been a better student.
  
  Long-term, shortcuts will still hamper learning. However, there is still a lot to be said about the over-reliance on testing in education in general. It, unfortunately, is a system that even educators must operate in without any real input. You likely will be surprised what you can do with a little guidance in a self-paced situation. What was that Mark Twain quote here - "Don't let your schooling interfere with your education."
  
  That's not really your fault but i hope you've planned what the long term means for you. We live in a society that expects higher education for any meaningful kind of occupation but simultaneously gate keeps it and pressures kids into lifetimes work of debt to keep forcing them through the system.
- I struggled with any math basically beyond fifth grade. It was incredibly hard for me. Math continued to build on the previous year until I worked my ass off to get C's. Every year after that I got C's all while spending hours and hours studying the homework and equations and doing problem after problem. I was in remedial math at community college. The only reason I passed college algebra was because the homework was online and I was able to do every problem over and over again until I got it right. That was 14% of my grade and got me up to a C.
  Some people don't get the support they need. In a subject like math that is detrimental.
  
  Fractions and decimals. There it is. You never learned how to read .125 as 1/8 and vice versa. This is the most common thing in the US, maybe elsewhere. If you don't really understand that, then Algebra and Calculus may as well be Greek to you.
- Parents perpetuating the myth of the “math gene” they don’t have because they failed at the "new math " of the 1970s, etc.
  This is a huge reason why I've never been able to help my daughter with her math homework. I learned to do things a totally different way from the way they teach now.
  
  I recognize the way they do math now as very similar to how I do it in my head. I still couldn't help my niece. The rules were so fucky to me.
- You can say "fuck" here, it's ok.

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.
  
  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.

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).

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.
- 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 love this lament.

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
- 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Math was a big issue for me, and all the colleges in CA were shutting down any math classes lower than college algebra. I barely made it into the beginning and intermediate algebra classes before they shut them down.
What they do now if funnel all the students who don't test into college algebra into "college math topics" which is an array of real-life mathematics that you'd come scross, like voting types and loans/interest rates. Which is a good thing to have as a class, but wouldn't have helped me get my degree in drafting.
It's a real good thing khan academy exsists.

“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.

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

I blame the way they teach math
- There's not a very good way to teach math without restructuring the whole system.
  I bet a lot more people would be interested in their subjects if they could learn at their own pace and go to an expert for help when they get stuck. That way, everything they're learning is immediately relevant to them. It'd be harder for instructors, of course. But I don't think we should structure education around what's easiest for the teachers.

I had to student teach secondary mathematics in october of 2020.
My host teacher was very up-to-date on online learning platforms (like pear deck and desmos) so i got to teach while learning these programs and making lessons with someone very knowledgeable with this. We also had 30% IEP students but also had a special education teacher so that helped a lot as well.
But otherwise most of the teachers were unprepared to teach themselves.
If you used manipulatives which i deem necessary to visualize fractions you were out of luck :(

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

106 comments