“What the 2009 NAEP Math Scores Tell Us?”

Lisa Guernsey wrote an article on “What the 2009 NAEP Math Scores Tell Us?” posted on 14 October 2009 at http://www.newamerica.net/blog/early-ed-watch/2009/what-2009-naep-math-scores-tell-us-15346#comment-4156.

Her opening phrase “No progress on the math front” is a reaction to the 4th-graders’ scores. She highlighted that there is room for improvement for Mathematics education and concluded that if we want to improve students’ Math proficiency, we have to improve teachers’ proficiency too.

I personally view the teacher's ability in the effective delivery of lessons that help pupils to learn, in two knowledge domains. The first one is the teacher's content knowledge. That is the teacher's proficiency in the subject. There is another domain which is the teacher's pedagogical content knowledge. This is the ability to make the content easily accessible and thus understood by the pupils. Both domains continually strengthen each other and contribute to the success in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Instead of isolating development on one domain at a time, both domains should not be separated but be developed concurrently. Thus, if we want to improve the students’ Math proficiency, we need to improve not only the teachers’ proficiency (content knowledge) as mentioned by the author, but also their pedagogical knowledge.

Besides testing teacher's proficiency, an effective professional development through Lesson Study, used very effectively in Japan to improve pupils' standard in mathematics, may be considered to improve the two domains mentioned above.