25 Years of Mathematics Teaching in the Classroom: Recommendations for the Field

• In Event: Challenges and Successes in Early-Grades Mathematics Education in Low-Income Contexts

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that mathematical skills are essential to later academic achievement and economic well-being in both high- and low-resource countries (Duncan et al., 2007; Hanushek and Woessmann, 2008). At the same time, primary education enrollment has increased dramatically in the developing world (UNESCO, 2014). However, the acceleration of expansion of this access to education has not been associated with high quality instruction. One third of all children who have completed primary school in these countries have not attained even basic skill levels in mathematics (p. 191). We will briefly present evidence from an analysis of research in classrooms in low- and middle-income countries on four sets of effective instructional practices for which there is strong evidence from multiple contexts.

Our review of the research was conducted from July-September of 2014. In order to access a broad base of scholarship, including non-journal-based research, we employed Google Scholar. We searched for papers published between 1989 and 2014 that listed “teaching practices”, “primary math”, and “developing countries” as keywords. This search yielded 114 papers. Even with this broader-based search engine, we felt that some valuable reports would be missed. We therefore examined bibliographies for possible references of interest (including the latest Education for All Monitoring Report 2014) and queried multiple researchers and practitioners in the field in order to gather reports that may inform our analysis, but had not yet been published or were not intended as manuscripts. Our criteria for inclusion consisted of the following:
• Research on interventions targeting teaching practices, including in-service training, pre-service training, and classroom interventions.
• Focus on preschool to grade 3 mathematics
• Intervention in a low- or middle-income country
• Availability of the article/report

In conclusion, we present recommendations for future research and open the floor for discussion.

Author

• Linda Michele Platas, San Francisco State University