20/05/2019

Mathematics is still in its infancy in the country's elite schools.

Antonio Cardoso do Amaral (à dir.) e Raimundo Alves de Brito, professores de matemática da Escola Estadual Augustinho Brandão, em Cocal dos Alves (PI). Adriano Vizoni/Folhapress

Reproduction from Folha de S.Paulo

By Érica Fraga and Paulo Saldaña – Honorable mention in the Mathematics category of the 2018 IMPA-SBM Journalism Award

Brazil's enormous difficulty in teaching mathematics goes far beyond the public school system.

The performance of the country's elite private schools in the subject is only surpassed by that achieved by students from socioeconomic backgrounds below the average in developed nations.

When compared to educational institutions that serve high-income students in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the grades of Brazilian schools with an equivalent socioeconomic profile are disappointing.

The data was collected by the Lemann Foundation based on PISA, an international learning assessment.

In the last test, in 2015, Brazilian students from elite private institutions averaged 497.2 points in mathematics, compared to 541 points obtained by students from the highest socioeconomic classes attending all types of schools in the OECD.

A score of 43.8 points is equivalent, according to the PISA scale, to a learning delay of more than one year.

"It's a very significant difference, considering that this is a socially privileged class," says Ernesto Martins Faria, an economist at the Lemann Foundation, who is responsible for the study.

The breakdown of PISA results by socioeconomic level reveals that the performance of Brazilian schools in the super-rich class also lags behind that of institutions whose students have incomes only slightly above the OECD average.

Socioeconomic level is strongly correlated with academic performance. Wealthier students have a more solid cultural and social context to achieve better results. In addition, private schools are generally better structured.

The PISA math questions aim to test the ability of 15-year-olds to identify patterns and solve real-life problems. Therefore, reasoning is more important than memorization.

"We don't teach students to reason because the culture of training for tests still prevails," says Antonio José Lopes, PhD in mathematics didactics and author of textbooks.

Lopes says that even the teaching of multiplication tables should not be based solely on memorization, and illustrates this with an example:

"The student may not remember what 7 times 9 is. But, if they know how to reason, they will realize that 9 is close to ten. And it's easier to multiply 7 by 10 and then subtract 7."

Cultural

The problem in Brazil, experts say, involves several dimensions and affects all types of schools. It includes a lack of support for schools and deficiencies in teacher training. "There seems to be a weakness in the way we teach mathematics," says Faria, from Lemann.

There is also a family and social culture of aversion to mathematics. "We start instilling in children's minds from a very young age that mathematics is difficult, that it's for a select few," says Ricardo Falzetta, content manager of the Todos Pela Educação (All for Education) Movement.

The OECD divides learning into six levels of proficiency. Among Brazilian private schools, only 0.4% of students reach level 6, the highest level.

At this stage, the young people have reached what the organization calls "advanced thinking and argumentation," managing to tackle new mathematical problems.

The percentage of students in Brazilian private schools who fail to reach level 2 (capable of using basic algorithms, formulas, and conventions) is 30%. In public schools, the scenario is worse, at 77%. In Chile, for example, the percentage is 14%. In Japan, it's 9%.

Difficulty

You receive a math question and the first thing that comes to mind isn't the solution, but rather: I don't know math, I'm going to get it wrong. This is what's called "math anxiety," explains Professor Flavio Comin from UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul).

"This feeling occupies working memory and is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy," Comin adds.

The researcher states that students' difficulties with learning mathematics are strongly related to their families. "Parents don't know math and, starting in the Wednesdays and Thursdays grade, they begin to disengage from monitoring their children's studies."

The lack of incentives to get students interested in the subject affects all types of students.

"But in a country with great inequalities, upper-middle-class children may get the impression that they don't need to make an effort; they know where they are," says the professor, who coordinates studies on the mathematical knowledge of adults in relation to other countries.

Marcelo Viana, director of IMPA (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics), also insists on the negative image of the subject. "Brazil is by far the country that has the least contact with pure mathematics," says Viana, who is a columnist for Folha. "The discourse that mathematics is difficult, only for geniuses, creates an alibi that it is not necessary to learn it," he says.

Both researchers emphasize the impact of teacher quality.

"All studies show the importance of the teacher. And the difficulty here, from the point of view of classroom management, is that the training is still very theoretical," adds Comin, from UFRGS.

And the problem is even more serious. Across the country, 67.5% of high school math teachers don't even have formal training in the field.

The National Common Curriculum Base is seen by experts as having the potential to bring about change. In addition to defining what students should learn each year of basic education, the document – still under review – is expected to impact changes in the teacher training model in the country.

Antonio José Lopes, a specialist in mathematics teaching methodology, is not so optimistic. "The curriculum rigidly defines the content by grade level. It doesn't foresee mathematics learning evolving as a process. It limits teaching to fragmented topics."

According to studies, the cost of a country performing poorly in mathematics will become increasingly high, especially since virtually all technological development is strongly linked to this field.

Between 1980 and 2012, occupations that required both high mathematical skills and characteristics such as the ability to work in groups increased by 7.2 percentage points relative to the total workforce in the United States, according to research by economist David Deming of Harvard University (USA).

Other areas

In addition to mathematics, PISA assesses the learning of 15-year-old students in science and reading every three years.

In these other two subjects, the learning gap between elite private schools in Brazil and those in wealthy nations is smaller than in mathematics. In science, the score of Brazilian students from higher socioeconomic levels is 27.3 points lower than that of the wealthiest students in the OECD. In reading, Brazil's gap is 25.3 points.