David Budge reports on research into how the market approach has affected the way schools are managed. Teachers who try to make maths more relevant to girls by presenting them with test questions that are regarded as “female-friendly” may be unwittingly ensuring that they score lower marks.
Jo Boaler of King’s College, London, has found that girls may have little difficulty in answering questions on football or woodwork themes but can fare significantly worse than boys if given a question that relates to the fashion industry.
Ms Boaler, who issued a six-question test to 50 pupils in each of two secondary schools, discovered that in one school boys and girls performed equally well in each of the questions, which were either abstract or placed in a context. But in the second school the girls did badly in the fashion question (see box, right) even though they coped as well as the boys with the other five questions.
“The responses of the 16 girls who attained lower grades on the fashion question suggest that underachievement was caused or influenced by a greater involvement in the question,” Ms Boaler says. “This involvement took a variety of different forms. Some students discussed the nature of the jobs and gave their opinion on the importance of the different jobs. Others took account of the order that the jobs would have to be encountered in.”
She points out that the best way to approach the fashion question is to ignore the context and deal with the numbers.
The girls who “underachieved” used their common sense as well as their mathematical knowledge and were penalised for doing so.
Ms Boaler suggests that the reasons why one set of girls did markedly better than the other can be traced back to the schools’ very different approaches to the teaching of mathematical processes.
The school where girls underachieved on the fashion question uses the SMP 11-16 scheme and expects pupils to conduct maths investigations as part of their homework rather than in the classroom. It is not a particularly “traditional” maths department, she says, adding that the teachers “valued investigative work and believed that mathematical communication is important”. The department does, however, give pupils closed questions and does not encourage communication and negotiation.
By contrast, the other school has dropped the SMP scheme and requires pupils to work on open-ended activities at all times.
“All pupils who work in mixed-ability classes are given the same open-ended activities. They are then encouraged to investigate and discover the mathematics, following any route or forming any resolution which they deem to be appropriate,” Ms Boaler explains.
She stresses that it would be wrong to conclude that questions which involve real-world variables or contexts should not be used in assessment. What her research shows, she says, is the folly of introducing real-world variables to maths questions and then expecting pupils to ignore them.
“Mathematics questions should . . . instead enable pupils to consider and examine the underlying structures and processes which connect classroom questions with real situations,” she says.
“Mathematical training to ignore real-world considerations, which I believe is what is effectively offered by mathematics questions, such as those used in the SMP 11-16 scheme, must be part of the reason for students’ apparent inability to transfer mathematics to the real world as well as the source of much of girls’ underachievement and disinterest in the subject.”
Jo Boaler’s account of her research appears in the current issue of the British Educational Research Journal.
