Social, institutional, and pedagogical changes are required to make our children proficient, and interested, in Mathematics
“Mathematics is the language in which God has written the Universe”
— Galileo
Mathematics is a branch of science that mainly deals with quantitative facts, forming generalizations, establishing relationships and developing logical thinking and reasoning. It is a systematised and organised body of science that is expressed symbolically.
Mathematics is the only subject that encourages and develops logical thinking and creative imagination. We often use mathematical vocabulary like commission, discount, profit and loss, percentage, etc, in our day to day life. In the words of IG Kemeny, whether man’s travel carries him into space or into theoretical science, his passport must be stamped with the mathematician’s seal or approval.
Various cultural and creative arts like painting, drawing, sculpture are based on mathematical knowledge. Many vocational courses require knowledge of mathematical skills. The development of a country depends on its business and industry, which, too, utilise mathematics. In the fields of space research, ecology, defence, healthcare, finance, mathematics is extensively used.
Mathematical puzzles, induction and finding alternate ways to solve problems are the recreational value that mathematics adds to our lives. As a result, it is necessary that we should have a solid understanding and knowledge of mathematical concepts like units, numbers, measurement, shape, size, direction, distance, fraction, equal, group, and sub-group. In the words of Thorndike, education as a whole should foster the higher impersonal pleasures. Mathematics also fullfils that function, and it’s also a source of pleasure and amusement.
Symmetry is the cornerstone of the beautiful creation of the universe, e.g., beehives, nests of birds, spider nets have beautiful mathematical structure. There is no discipline in which mathematics is not applicable, and yet despite its wide applicability mathematics is regarded as a challenging academic discipline, due to which most students avoid this subject.
The National Education Policy 2020 has laid emphasis on ‘’Foundation Literacy and Numeracy: An urgent & Necessary Prerequisite to learning’’. As per its final report, various surveys conducted by government and non-governmental organisations indicate that we are in a learning crisis: a large proportion of students currently in elementary school – estimated to be over 5 crore in number – have not attained foundation literacy and numeracy, i.e., the ability to read to comprehend basic text and the ability to carry out basic addition and subtraction. As a result, achieving foundation literacy and numeracy for all children will become an urgent national endeavour, requiring quick action on many fronts and the setting of clear short-term goals.
By 2025, the education system’s main aim will be to attain universal foundation literacy and numeracy in elementary schools. For this, National Mission on Foundation Literacy and numeracy will be set up by the Ministry of Education on top priority. All the state/UT governments should also make plans for attaining foundation literacy and numeracy in all primary schools. Teachers should be given proper training, encouragement and support system, so that they can impart foundational literacy and numeracy.
As per The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), by NGO Pratham, 56% of students in class VIII can’t divide a 3-digit number with a single digit number, 72% students in class V can’t do division at all, and 70% of class III students are not able to do any subtraction. Girls are behind boys in basic arithmetic knowledge: only 44% of all girls could solve division problems compared with 50% of the boys. But girls are doing better in states like Himachal, Punjab, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
As per National Achievement Survey Report (NAS) 2021, released by Ministry of Education, mathematics achievement score across India was 57% in class third, dropping by almost 10% to 44% in fifth, and to 36% in class eighth and 32% in class 10th. Today’s situation is significantly worse than a decade ago. When challenged to perform numerically, the majority of pupils experience anxiety, avoid maths class, experience physical illness, faintness, dread or fear and are unable to compete an exam. As a result of these factors many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) careers are avoided by such students.
Most of the competitive examinations at national and state level require mathematical aptitude but students who are facing maths anxiety perform badly in these examinations and hence lose many job opportunities. Individuals may experience math anxiety in any quantitative reasoning activity, such as balancing a checkbook, reading a quantitative research study, interpreting election poll results, or thinking critically about whether an infographic accompanying televised news may be misleading.
Maths anxiety can have multiple causes. In the clinical literature it has been shown that children who have a parent with an anxiety disorder are more than seven times more likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder when compared to children without anxious parents. It has been seen that parents who themselves suffer from maths anxiety can unintentionally transfer it to their children. Parents who often give low status to mathematics or at times put pressure on their children may also contribute to the development of mathematical anxiety among students. Parents often raise anxiety among their children by providing them with an excuse to stop trying when they are frustrated or upset due to difficulties with mathematical tasks. Parents most often say, ‘I have never understood Algebra; maths was always a tricky subject for me at school’. All these things make children believe that they are incapable of learning mathematics because their parents too were not good at it.
Overbearing parental pressure for success or concern about the difficulty of mathematics may contribute to maths anxiety. Social factors such as mathematical myths may also induce or reinforce maths anxiety for some students, for example the myth that boys are better than girls in maths and that only some people have a ‘mathematical mind’. Studies suggest that in combination with parental and societal factors, maths anxiety may also have its roots in classrooms situations. It has been seen that maths anxious teachers often result in maths anxious students. Most of the teachers often put emphasis on traditional instructional activities such as drills, flashcards, and worksheets and often assign the same work to the whole class in a maths class. Due to unavailability of maths teacher in most schools, teachers with English or history background teach mathematics. This can also lead to poor mathematical performance and can become a cause for mathematical anxiety among students. Biological studies carried out on mathematical anxiety found that maths anxious individuals have a deficient inhibition mechanism, whereby working memory resources are consumed by irrelevant distractions.
Many programmes have been launched to help children enhance their basic numeracy and mathematical abilities. Pratham, an NGO working in education sector, has started many programmes related to numeracy and literacy, one of which is “I Scream and I Count: Early literacy and numeracy’’ popularly referred to as Balwachan. This programme is designed for children studying in standards I and II, to strengthen their literacy and numeracy skills as a foundation towards their classroom learning. Reading, writing, number recognition, basic addition and substraction are some of the skills that are developed through various activities like picture reading, storytelling, word games and many more. Apart from this, the National Curriculum Framework (2005) has laid down following objectives for teaching mathematics:
• Children should enjoy mathematics rather than fear it.
• It’s the responsibility of every mathematics teacher to engage children in class so that everyone should enjoy mathematics.
• Children should be encouraged to create and solve significant challenges.
• Mathematics should be seen as something that children can debate, communicate about, and collaborate on.
• Students should be motivated to use abstraction to perceive relationships, to see structures, to reason out things.
Teachers should give special emphasis on experimentation and exploration and try to teach mathematics by relating it with real life situations. Mathematics laboratories should be established. Practical mathematics through visualization should be taught to students. At secondary stage, students begin to perceive structure of mathematics as a discipline. They become familiar with the characteristics of mathematical communication, thus acquire a special language which serves as a medium of thought that involves combination of words, symbols, logical reasoning, formulas etc. These aspects are needed to be developed in areas of Algebra and Geometry.
Teachers should make changes in their pedagogical processes, like they can encourage students to discuss in groups about the properties of triangles and construction of geometrical shapes, line segments, and bisectors. Students should be engaged in surveys and the data obtained from these surveys can be represented pictorially such as on bar graphs, histograms, frequency polygon. Teachers can help students to investigate the characteristics of solid objects encountered in everyday life and identify them as cubes, cuboids, cylinders, and so on. Students can also visualise concepts using Geogebra and other ICT tools.
DIETs should organise proper training courses for mathematics teachers from time to time and it’s the responsibility of government recruitment agencies to appoint subject expert teachers by conducting proper screening of these teachers before appointing them. Also, reflective teaching and proper assessment on behalf of teacher and student will help in reducing mathematical anxiety.
Parents should also provide a congenial and loving home environment to their children and should not put pressure on them. Instead, they should try to build confidence of their children by discussing with them motivational stories and lives of great scientists, engineers, space researchers who suffered from this problem, like Albert Einstein did. He said, ’Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you mine are still greater’. All these things can help boost the morale of the children.
There should also be behavioural and attitudinal change among all stakeholders to build the mindset that girls can also do well in mathematics, like renowned female mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Standford University. It is pertinent here to mention that the most prestigious award in mathematics, i.e., Fields Medal, has been won by Maryam Mirzakhani. The Ramanujan prize award has been won by Neena Gupta, Professor at Indian institute of Statistics Kolkata. Shakuntala Devi, an Indian mathematician and writer popularly known as “Human Computer”, made a place in 1982 edition of Guinness Book of Records. Many girls across the globe are pursuing careers in mathematics.
In the backdrop of the above facts we must develop optimal teaching learning process at all levels by relating mathematics with real life situations and provide an environment meant to develop concepts. It’s the responsibility of parents, teachers, policy makers, educationists to develop confidence in our children related to this subject and try to take such measures in which students don’t feel anxious while given tests or taking this subject as a career option. Because without mathematics, there is nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.
The writer is a research scholar at Department of Education, South Campus, University of Kashmir. si******@***il.com