An article by Liping Ma on the US school mathematics in the November issue of the “Notices of the AMS”.:
http://www.ams.org/notices/201310/fea-ma.pdf
It may be of broader interest and applicable not only to the US.
Citizen’s Maths is a MOOC project funded by the Ufi Charitable Trust. It
is led by Calderdale College with CogBooks, the Institute of Education,
and OCR.
http://goo.gl/RexVLv is a call for maths teachers to express an interest
in working with Citizens’ Maths as “to camera” tutors.
The deadline for responses is Thursday 5/12/2013.
Please spread the call as widely as you wish.
Published today:
A. D. Gardiner, National curriculum (England), September 2013; Attainment targets and programmes of study (key stages 1–3). Comments and suggested necessary changes. The De Morgan Gazette 4 , no. 3 (2013), 13-57
From the Introduction:
The Education Order 2013 was “made” on 5 September 2013. The relevant details were “laid before parliament” on 11 September 2013, and will come into effect on 1 September 2014. Some of the details for GCSE were published on 1 November 2013. Further elaboration of GCSE assessment structure, and curriculum guidance for Key Stage 4 (Years 10–11, ages 14–16) are awaited.
It is generally agreed that the curriculum review process adopted over the last 3–4 years has been seriously flawed. Those involved worked hard, often under very difficult conditions. But the overall approach (of relying on civil servants and drafters whose responsibilities and constraints remained inscrutable) has merely demonstrated that drafting and maintaining curricula is a specialist task, requiring dedicated professionals with specialist experience.
Whatever flaws there may have been in the process, we will all have to live with the new curriculum for some years. So it is important to have an open discussion of the likely difficulties. This article is an attempt to indicate aspects of the National curriculum in England: mathematics programmes of study that will need to be handled with considerable care, and revised in the light of experience.
After three years of widespread unease about the process of the curriculum review and its apparent direction, it is remarkable that there has been almost no media coverage, and no clear professional response to the final mathematics programmes of study for ages 5–14. There is therefore a real danger that insights that emerged along the way will simply be forgotten, and that the same mistakes may then be made next time. […]
The details laid before parliament are `statutory’; but they incorporate basic flaws, and significant contradictions between the statutory list of content (which could all-too-easily be imposed uncritically) and the declared over-arching “aims” (which could get forgotten, or ignored). Given these flaws, the fate of the new programmes of study will depend on how sensitively their implementation is handled—whether slavishly, or intelligently. Teachers—and Ofsted, senior management, etc.—need to be alert to those aspects of the stated programmes of study that incorporate predictable pitfalls.
We summarise here what seem to be the two most important flaws.
Some material in Key Stage 1 and 2 is very poorly specified (especially from Year 4 onwards).
Some items are listed unnecessarily and unrealistically early, and so may be introduced at a stage:
- where they are not yet needed,
- where they will not be understood,
- where they will be badly taught, and
- where – if the relevant requirements were relaxed – the premature material could easily be delayed without causing any subsequent problems.
The listing of content for Key Stage 3 is in some ways reasonable, but too many things are left implicit. The programme of study is less structured than, and contains less detail than, that for Key Stages 1 and 2. Hence the details of the Key Stage 3 programme need interpretation. At present:
In addition
In summary, if the declared goals for Key Stage 4 are to be realised,
After a successful beta run, we’re happy to officially release MathJax v2.3.
MathJax v2.3 is available on the CDN, and for download from GitHub or via the download page at http://www.mathjax.org/download/.
Version 2.3 is available on the CDN at
http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/2.3-latest/MathJax.js
and starting today the files at the
http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js
address will be switched over the v2.3; it will take 24h-48h for the changes to propagate out to the distributed cloud servers.
Reformed GCSE subject content includes three types of content: standard, underlined and bold. In the words of he document,
The expectation is that:
The distinction between standard, underlined and bold type applies to the content statements only, not to the assessment objectives or to the mathematical formulae in the appendix.
What follows is the list of items in the Mathematics GCSE subject content and assessment objectives which contain bold type, higher content.I think this short lists clearly marks the boundaries of GCSE — AB
A list of problems (443 at the latest count) on the Project Euclid site. Appear to be very suitable by solving on Raspbeyry Pi.
From a post by Philip Stark on The Berkeley Blog:
● student teaching evaluation scores are highly correlated with students’ grade expectations[10]
● effectiveness scores and enjoyment scores are related[11]
● students’ ratings of instructors can be predicted from the students’ reaction to 30 seconds of silent video of the instructor: first impressions may dictate end-of-course evaluation scores, and physical attractiveness matters[12]
● the genders and ethnicities of the instructor and student matter, as does the age of the instructor[13]
Red the whole text.
From the Department for Education:
Following the GCSE subject content consultation that closed on 20 August 2013, the Secretary of State has today published revised subject content for English language, English literature and mathematics, as well as the Government’s response to the consultation. The Secretary of State has also made a Written Ministerial Statement, which can be read here.
Ofqual has also published reforms to the design requirements for new GCSEs, including on arrangements for controlled assessment, tiering and new grading. Its summary of these reforms can be found here.
Ofqual today (1st November 2013) […]) announced a revised timetable for the reforms, meaning new GCSEs in English language, English literature and maths will take priority and will be introduced for first teaching from 2015.
The Department for Education will today be confirming the subject content for these subjects, following a separate consultation.
Key features of the new GCSEs in England will include:
Read the full statement from Ofqual.
De Morgan Gazette 