I have a weak interest in the best way to teach things. There are two interesting things in the U.K. around it. One is that methods for teaching children to read seem to have improved recently (that is, the results in tests used to measure reading ability have improved) and there has been a claim that this was mainly due to doing and then applying the results of some research into how to best teach it. The research was cheap and one wonders if it could be applied to more situations. Meanwhile in mathematics there is a regular desire from governments to improve the mathematics that is learned but it feels like the efforts don’t go so well. Usually any time mathematics education is in the news, Simon Jenkins will trot out the same ridiculous tired old article against mathematics education. The disconnect between the way that mathematicians and non-mathematicians think about mathematics education seems pretty bad to me.
I have a weak interest in the best way to teach things. There are two interesting things in the U.K. around it. One is that methods for teaching children to read seem to have improved recently (that is, the results in tests used to measure reading ability have improved) and there has been a claim that this was mainly due to doing and then applying the results of some research into how to best teach it. The research was cheap and one wonders if it could be applied to more situations. Meanwhile in mathematics there is a regular desire from governments to improve the mathematics that is learned but it feels like the efforts don’t go so well. Usually any time mathematics education is in the news, Simon Jenkins will trot out the same ridiculous tired old article against mathematics education. The disconnect between the way that mathematicians and non-mathematicians think about mathematics education seems pretty bad to me.