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[quote=Anonymous]The key is "knowledgeable teachers".  The best book explaining the difference between math education in the U.S and China is a book by Liping Ma called Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics. The book compared a group of US teachers that were rated above average and Chinese teachers when they were asked how to solve four different types of problems. For example Ma asked the teachers:

People seem to have different approaches to solving problems involving division with  fractions. How do you solve a problem like this one?  1 3/4 ÷ 1 /2=     
Imagine that you are teaching division with fractions. To make this meaningful for kids, something that many teachers try to do is relate mathematics to other things. Sometimes they  try to come up with real-world situations or story-problems to show the application of some particular piece of content. What would you say would be a good story or model for this problem.

Only 9 of the 21 U.S. teachers who worked the problem produced the correct numerical answer to the division problem. This clearly points to a problem with the teachers’ algorithmic competency.  In contrast, all 72 Chinese teachers performed the computation correctly. Only one of the U.S. teachers generated a story that corresponded correctly to the given division. In contrast, 90% of the Chinese teachers generated appropriate stories for the division.  U.S. teachers were taught by teachers without a profound understanding of math so they teach the way that they were taught which creates a never ending cycle of incompetent teachers. One way to change the system would be for math to be taught by math teachers/specialists at the elementary level instead of elementary teachers.

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