Newswise — President Obama launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to inspire and excite U.S. kids to work hard to move to the head of the class in science, technology, engineering, and math—also known as STEM education courses—over the next decade. The initiative, which has enlisted leading companies, nonprofits, and foundations to motivate students, especially middle and high school, to excel in math and science, will focus mostly on activities outside the classroom.
Mathematics educator Jeffrey Choppin, who directs the mathematics teacher education program at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education, says that the initiative is a step in the right direction in that it increases opportunities for students to learn outside the classroom by interacting with each other and knowledgeable adults around STEM content in ways that are stimulating and authentic. What the campaign fails to address, however, are core issues related to how students learn mathematics with understanding in the classroom and how they understand the place of mathematics in the world, which is equally important to impacting student learning and interest to STEM fields. “A major concern today is how to recruit talented, highly-qualified students to STEM fields and away from other fields that have been perceived as being more lucrative,” he explains. “And, as a nation, we need to do a better job of broadening the pool of highly qualified students by engaging more students early on, especially during the middle school years, in thinking about mathematics both inside and outside the classroom.”
He suggests that the “Educate to Innovate” campaign should help students tackle problems that are authentic and mathematically intriguing. The best problems help students connect their intuitive ways of thinking to mathematical forms of reasoning. For example, students encounter the concept of rate of change in many forms in their daily existence. Designing experiences in which students connect their informal reasoning around rate of change to more formal concepts involving mathematical functions and ultimately the foundations of calculus might help students stay engaged and interested in mathematics. Ideally, the “Educate to Innovate” campaign would eventually foster similar experiences in K-12 classrooms.
Choppin, who received a doctorate in mathematics education from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, focuses his own research on how teachers adapt mathematics curricula, the resources they draw on in the adaption process, and the impact of the stability of the instructional context on teachers’ effective use of curricula. The context of his research is middle school mathematics classrooms that are using National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded mathematics curricula designed to help students learn mathematics with understanding. In 2008, he was awarded a major NSF CAREER grant for his five-year study that seeks to improve the quality of mathematics curricula and instruction in U.S. middle schools. In 1995, he was named a Presidential Awardee for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching while teaching in the Washington, D.C. public schools.
For more information about the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/president-obama-launches-educate-innovate-campaign-excellence-science-technology-en.
RSS