AP: Happy, confident students do worse in math


The Associated Press has published an article about a study which concludes that the American educational system's obsession with making math fun and relevant to daily life has come at the expense of students' understanding of math. The complete article can be obtained here and here.

I can't comment directly on the study, because I don't know how data were collected and analyzed. Nevertheless, I tend to believe the conclusion of the study.

Here's the way I see it: While education for its own sake is not sufficiently valued in our culture, fun and recreation are overvalued. The problem is that fun, to too large an extent, replaced genuine learning. In response, our educational system devised a strategy of tricking students into learning something by incorporating fun activities, much as a mother tries to get her baby to eat by pretending that the spoon is an airplane. The baby gets nourishment, but the students, at least according to the study reported by the AP, wind up with diminished individual knowledge and understanding. I would hazard the guess that the problem is not limited to math. It's just more apparent in math.

I don't think that all the fun should be taken out of our educational strategies. I just think that the satisfaction of learning should be put back into it.


Posted: Wednesday - October 25, 2006 at 07:09 AM        

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