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2 + 2 = Asia??? America Looks to Asia for Math Help Islam Online, DC For better or for worse, the world looks to America as the leader in most things. Math education is not one of those things. Several wide-ranging studies done in the past decade have shown American students consistently fall far behind their international peers in this important subject. Education curricula in the United States have been going through their own evolution away from rote memorization and drilling students to a more creative and thought-provoking style of learning. However, throughout these changes improvement to math education has been little, if any.Many American educators, alarmed by this trend, have begun to revisit the question of how they are teaching math. For answers, they looked to the countries that were excelling in math – Singapore, Korea, and Japan. What was happening in the classrooms of these nations and in the heads of these Asian students that was working so well? The Singapore and Japanese methods of math education are the two that have caught on most quickly with American educators. In the past few years, Singapore math textbook order have increased dramatically in the United States as more and more teachers look for a solution to their math problem. Professors are acting as trainers to schoolteachers interested in implementing the new curriculum. Japanese math is generally used as a supplement to the math already being taught in schools. Known as the “Kumon” method, it is being used by over 100,000 students in the United States, mostly at Kuman Math and Reading Centers. Advocates of these foreign-born curricula say that they provide a math education that is more versatile and therefore more useful in problem solving. Unlike the current American math education, these methods require a deeper understanding of basic math concepts and create the ability to connect one math concept to the next. The key is reinforcing a thorough and comprehensive mastery of basic math skills that will carry the student through more difficult math in the future. The sequencing of the math concepts is also very different from the current American math textbook and is said to be more logical in its order. The other key to this method is one that American schools have moved away from in the past – drill, drill, drill. Students are to work alone and repeat problems over and over until they master them, a task which consists on completing a certain number of problems with no errors in the given time.
Whether this math education trend will catch on in the United States remains to be seen. Whether it will ease the embarrassment of American educators over the ever-poorer performance of their students also remains to be seen. What is evident is that students using the Singapore and Japanese methods are definitely one step ahead of their peers.
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