Maryland could axe advanced math classes in elementary school

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:It’s more than just the pre k to 2nd bit.

“ In third to fifth grades, schools would only be permitted to regroup students for math class on a periodic basis. These children should “never be permanently grouped by ability,””

This sounds like you could not have a class that does more advanced math in 3rd - 5th either. All you could do was groupings “periodically”. That is going to be massively frustrating to the math kids bored out of their minds at the slow pace of normal instruction for 6 years.

My old district did this. They pretested kids before every unit and split them into groups based on the results. Some kids wee always in the top group, but some kids were better at certain topics and floated into the top group for those. And some topics were new to a grade and there was no top group.

The top group got enrichment rather than acceleration. They went deeper, not faster. It might have been harder to manage logistically, but it made more sense pedagogically.

This is a good way to do things. Lots of kids are not uniformly advanced, or have highs and lows over time, so on ramps are good. Also, socially, it normalizes growth (you can improve / it's nbd to miss the mark one time) instead of having to permanently maintain on track. My kid is in advanced classes and talks about the worry of bring demoted to the regular track even though we try to put zero pressure at home.

No, it’s a terrible way to do things. math is quantifiable by definition. kids are not this fragile. They can understand that their math class has a syllabus of topics to cover that they need to pass in order to advance. Putting them into a million different small groups just exacerbates the problem and distracts from instruction.

That's dumb. Small groups let the more advanced kids learn new material instead of material they already know.

+1 or go deeper. The goal should be understanding, not knocking out a skills test and then forgetting everything when you move on.

-100 especially at the elementary level. Memorization and embedding the skills is actually crucial. The pedagogical shift to “understanding” is what got us here. you learn math through drilling, practice, recall, repetition. lots of research on this. For example: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11251-024-09680-w

Paper said the opposite.
"spaced recall" is not drilling. It's revisiting content to keep it fresh. Visiting problems from multiple angles builds fluency. Drilling times tables leaves people with a mechanical ability (often forgotten later) that is misused or not used when complex problems appear and they don't understand how to model a problem or check their own work for mistakes.

Drilling (ie repetition) is absolutely a fundamental piece of learning content of all sorts. Kids without basic math fact recall cannot do the complex problems later on. Just like kids who cannot read because we skipped phonics cannot read Dostoyevsky.