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New report: National group cites 4 pillars to math education for young kids

A national nonprofit that aims to improve math outcomes for students in pre-K through fifth grade found there are four key elements to educating young learners — and not one of them can take a backseat.

cites content, competencies, ways of thinking, and motivators as the cornerstones of numeracy. The findings build upon hundreds of earlier studies and will help kids enter middle school with a strong math foundation, CEO Arun Ramanathan said.

And there is considerable consensus on the approach, he said.

“The framework offers long-needed alignment: not how to teach, but what must be developed and how the pieces fit,” Ramanathan said in an email to .

According to its report, released Feb. 4, content is centered on the core mathematical ideas that all future learning is based on, while competencies refers to the skills students need to use math meaningfully.

Ways of thinking encompasses the cognitive processes that support reasoning and problem-solving, while motivators signal the beliefs and mindsets that foster engagement and persistence.

“If you asked teachers what they think numeracy is, you will get a lot of different answers,” said Gloria Lee, lead author of the report. “There is not a clear framework or scaffolding for people to communicate all of these parts. So, we are trying to fill that void.”

The organization acknowledges the ongoing math wars, which pit explicit instruction, procedural fluency, guided practice and repetition against inquiry-based learning and conceptual understanding. It calls the dispute an unnecessary distraction.

PowerMyLearning, which hopes its paper becomes a guide for educators and policymakers, said each of these pillars breaks down into four different categories.

The four areas of content, for example, are integers, fractions, shapes and data, while the four competencies are conceptual understanding, fact fluency, procedural fluency and application. The four ways of thinking are symbolic understanding, pattern recognition, explaining and sense-making, while the motivators include math identity and persistence.

“Teachers, administrators and families must make intentional efforts to communicate that math is for everyone and everyone belongs in math,” the paper notes. “This requires explicitly promoting inclusive messages and countering negative ones, creating inclusive classroom environments, and establishing policies for support and acceleration rather than exclusivity.”

Jo Boaler, a mathematics education professor at Stanford University who co-authored California’s new math framework, reviewed PowerMyLearning’s paper and provided research for it.

“I appreciate that the report gives a balanced perspective on number sense, highlighting the importance of reasoning, problem solving and mindset, as well as procedures,” she said. “Hopefully, it helps to bridge the divides in mathematics education.”

PowerMyLearning was established in 1999 under another name and focused on technology in the classroom, including giving free hardware and software to schools in need. It later shifted to the “triangle of learning relationships” among students, teachers and families before zeroing in on early math. Though the organization aims to improve education for all, it focuses on multilingual learners and children from historically underserved communities.

CEO Ramanathan told The 74 in an interview last week that despite ongoing disputes about how math should be taught, there is actually an enormous amount of agreement around what students need to succeed.

“When you look at the areas folks are disagreeing about — conceptual understanding, fact fluency and procedural fluency — we put them all in one area, as competencies,” he said.

Students, he said, can’t spend all of their time repeating certain skills.

“They also have to be able to dig deeply into the reasons why certain elements of mathematics result in a correct answer,” he said. “For folks to be focusing on one element of that versus all of them together, when you see them all in one place, you don’t see them as (being) in conflict but in alignment.”

There is no need to favor one element of learning over another, the report notes.

“In fact, the evidence is clear that fluency with facts and procedures helps students with conceptual understanding and vice versa. Numeracy requires fluency with facts and procedures as well as conceptual understanding and the ability to apply these mathematical capabilities to situations in the real world.”

The group says its findings further the and integrate more than 200 studies across math learning science, developmental psychology, and mathematics education.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation and the Joseph Drown Foundation provide financial support to PowerMyLearning and

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