New Zealand’s once world-leading school system is in trouble. Literacy and numeracy rates continue to decline across the board, leading many to question where we have gone wrong. In part two of Making the Grade, education reporter Amy Wiggins examines whether teachers have been given the right tools to help children learn.

When New Zealand 9- to 10-year-olds were asked to solve 27 × 43, only 16 per cent got the right answer – from a multiple choice question.

Mathematician and tutor Dr Audrey Tan said our maths education system was literally worse than useless on that relatively simple equation for Year 5 students in the 2018/19 Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS).

“If the children had randomly guessed, their success rate should have been around 25 per cent.

“That means we’ve introduced something into the NZ education system that is so bad, our Kiwi kids would have been better off guessing.”

Our success in teaching reading and writing is not much better. Almost one in five students in the latest Programme for International Student Achievement failed to demonstrate the skills needed to be functionally literate.

Many in the education sector, including Tan, are now arguing that a focus on the science of learning and a return to traditional teaching methods will go a long way in lifting achievement.

The Government has responded with a maths action plan and the development of a common practice model for literacy and numeracy but the debate reignited last week after the launch of the Herald’s Making the Grade series and the National Party’s education policy, which focused on a back to basics approach in reading, writing, maths and science.

Much of the debate focused on National’s promise to bring back national testing in primary schools, but many critics of the current system argue that the bigger issue remains how children are learning in the first place.

‘It was confusing the kids’

Students at one Kapiti Coast school are so excited about maths they have been choosing to do maths problems before school instead of playing with their mates.

Kapakapanui School changed the way they were teaching maths last year and have already noticed an improvement in ability and increased enjoyment of the subject.

“When we started introducing it, teachers were writing a few problems on the board before school started, just to get ready for the day, and we found kids were coming in to class before school and sitting down with all their friends and doing maths instead of playing on their scooters or kicking a ball,” principal Craig Vidulich said.

“Kids don’t do maths before school but it was practice, it was gaining success and they were feeling pretty good about it.”

So how did they do it?

After noticing a decrease in their students’ confidence and ability in maths they asked Tan to take their staff through some professional development sessions.

That resulted in the school trying to simplify maths, largely by going back to an approach in which kids were taught to line up the numbers in columns to add, multiply, subtract and divide.

For about 20 years, most schools have followed an approach called the Numeracy Project which promoted teaching a range of strategies for solving problems.

Column maths was a part of that but was not taught until later in a student’s primary schooling.

“We reckon that’s wrong,” Vidulich said. “Kids have had several years of getting a bit confused on different things. It should have probably been introduced earlier.”

Going back to column maths was giving kids a tool that was reliable and simple and allowed them to solve big problems.

“When they can solve big problems they think, ‘hey, I can do maths’ and they quite like maths. Then they’re more open to solving more challenging things.”

Vidulich said they had stopped introducing as many strategies, which he believes was resulting in cognitive overload for many students, causing them to decide they hated maths or were no good at it.

“It was confusing the kids. They were losing their confidence.”

He said it was particularly useful for children who had learning difficulties, struggled with reading or had English as a second language.

But those who excelled at maths also gained plenty of opportunities to move on to harder problems or learn those other strategies, he said.

Walton School in Matamata has followed much the same path and seen the same improvement in students’ skills and attitudes toward mathematics.

Principal Jeremy Kurth said the method had allowed some of his students to progress to dealing with higher numbers than before.

“Some of our Year 5s are looking at numbers in their millions and using the same strategy that they learned doing 100s place values,” he said.

“Once they’ve got the method it’s applicable to larger numbers so they are getting introduced to larger numbers at a younger age.”

‘The same for nearly all students’

Those schools have taken up a teaching method known as the science of learning.

It is based on research by neuroscientists who have discovered how the brain learns. Those in the science of learning camp argue all teachers should have an understanding of it and teach accordingly.

Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood explained the cognitive process for learning was “the same for nearly all students”.

“It’s all around the importance of memory.”

Hood explained that before children could start problem-solving or thinking critically they needed knowledge about a topic encoded into their long-term memory.

That is because learning new information all happens in the working memory. However, there are limits on how much information it can hold and for how long - a concept called cognitive load theory.

That meant teachers needed to teach topics in small chunks and give students plenty of opportunities to practice that information and use it in different forms in order to move it into long-term memory where it could be built upon, Hood said.

“If we try to move through the content too quickly we run the risk of overloading students because their working memory can’t handle that much information and it runs the risk of them not remembering it or misinterpreting it.”

She said there also needed to be a degree of structure around the sequence subjects were taught in.

Michael Johnston, senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative, said in his Manifesto for Improving New Zealand’s School System that all training teachers should be taught the theory.

“Ensuring that teachers have a strong understanding of cognitive load theory and other key aspects of the science of learning, as well as the ways in which this knowledge can be applied to classroom practice, may be the single most effective measure that could be taken to improve teaching and learning at our schools.”

‘Start with the basic building blocks’

Dr Audrey Tan is fiercely critical of both the current maths curriculum and the way New Zealand teachers are now taught and expected to teach maths.

“We see high school students lacking many of the skills and dispositions required to work effectively at that level.

“We do what we have to do to get them through their exams, but all we’re doing is wallpapering over the cracks.

“It does not make up for the significant gaps in their primary school maths education.”

Tan gained her bachelors degree in maths, with first class honours, at the age of 17 and went on to earn a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

Now she runs Mathmo Consulting which provides maths tuition to students and professional development for teachers.

“Much of what I do when I work with primary school teachers is to enlighten them about those missing skills and dispositions, and show teachers how to integrate them into their teaching.”

Tan said she believed the “cognitive science of learning and understanding” was the best teaching method for the vast majority of students - and that’s how she trains teachers to teach.

“There’s only so much that children can absorb at any one time. Start with the basic building blocks and build on that,” she said.

“Maths is the study of patterns and structure, I think that students would find maths much easier to learn if we were providing them with more structure from the very beginning.

“We have a very top-down approach where children are supposed to learn through problem-solving but I think we understand a lot better now how that creates problems with cognitive overload.”

Tan said the current focus was on understanding maths but students first needed to know the how.

“You learn by actually doing. And through the doing we can unpack that and understand how it actually works,” she said.

“At primary school we’ve taken away the easiest methods and tried to make them think like adults, but they’re not adults.

“It is basic common sense that we would start with the easiest methods first and then refine those methods later with more sophisticated strategies.”

That is why New Zealand students did so terribly when asked to figure out what 27 × 43 equals.

Instead of lining up the columns in the way past generations were taught, children are taught to multiply horizontally by breaking it down to “tidy” numbers.

Tan wants to see a return to students first learning column-based maths methods.

“The benefits of lining up the columns cannot be overlooked because our decimal number system is a place value number system and it was designed to be used in columns.

“The idea that we are trying to teach our primary school students to do basic arithmetic without lining up the columns is extraordinarily prohibiting.

“They are just so bogged down trying to work with numbers and teachers are going to be spending far too much time looking at the different ways that they could work with numbers and a lot of other really valuable learning in mathematics is sacrificed.”

Massey University Institute of Education Professor Jodie Hunter agreed the science of learning could be helpful in teaching maths but said it should be combined with other strategies.

Teachers also needed to give students the opportunity to do more complex tasks, she said.

“One of the key things we often find is that teachers are quite often surprised at what children are capable of learning,” she said.

In TIMSS, Kiwi kids traditionally scored poorly in questions that involved numbers with three digits or more.

“Numbers follow patterns,” Hunter said. “Kids just need the opportunity to do that in the classroom.”

‘Things are changing for literacy’

The science of learning is widely being adopted by schools to help teach reading and writing.

Known as structured literacy, it is an explicit, systematic approach which frames the English language as a code and teaches children how to decode it by teaching them the links between the sounds of our spoken language and the groups of letters which form them.

While some New Zealand schools have made the shift to structured literacy of their own accord, most still use balanced literacy, which treats phonics more as the last resort when children can’t figure out a word using cues like pictures and context.

While most children taught using balanced literacy did learn to read, it didn’t work for about a quarter of students, according to James Chapman, Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology at Massey University.

But, the years-long fight by Chapman and other proponents of structured literacy appears to be bearing fruit.

This term, a full collection of decodable books developed by the Ministry of Education is being delivered to all primary schools.

The Ready to Read Phonics Plus books encourage the systematic use of phonics to teach children to read.

Massey University’s structured literacy facilitator Dr Christine Braid, who works in schools that are adopting the approach, described it as an “improved” way of teaching and hoped all teachers got the chance to try it.

She said having the full package of Phonics Plus books would allow all schools and teachers to do just that, if they wanted to.

“The new books in the series and the associated scope and sequence or progression provide a clear pathway for teachers and will allow schools to use a systematic approach.”

Braid stressed phonics needed to be combined with teachers reading students more complex, vocabulary-rich texts.

Chapman, who is one of 12 people contributing their ideas to the Ministry of Education’s formation of a new common practice model for teaching literacy, agreed the Phonics Plus books were a “great start”.

Mother Lisa Chu said her daughter’s reading and writing had “dramatically improved” since her school, Baverstock Oaks, started using structured literacy last year.

“Even if she doesn’t know the word she can decode it and if she’s heard it before she can recognise it.”

Jeremy Drummond, executive director of SPELD NZ - an organisation that works with people who have specific learning difficulties like dyslexia - said a structured literacy approach was the best way for those people to learn to read and write.

Drummond stressed that all children benefit from learning the rules of reading and writing, not only those with learning difficulties.

‘An equal opportunity’

The development of common practice models for both literacy and numeracy was announced by Education Minister Jan Tinetti in August last year as a way to make sure all teachers had the same understanding of how to teach those essential skills.

At the time she acknowledged the topics were being taught differently between schools, and sometimes between different classrooms in the same school.

Speaking to the Herald this month, Tinetti confirmed she supported the use of phonics.

“The Ministry believes that for students to become effective readers, they need to be able to ‘crack the written code’ in texts, make meaning from texts, and think critically about texts. I agree with this position,” she said.

“The Ready to Read Phonics Plus books focus on word recognition knowledge and skills that explicitly support children to ‘crack the code’.

“Other Ministry resources, such as the Junior Journal and School Journal, focus more on helping ākonga (students) make meaning and think critically.”

Tinetti told the Herald the new models and curriculum would also provide more detailed information to support the teaching of maths.

Phase one of the common practice model was released two weeks ago and included an overview of nine different teaching methods - one based around structured literacy.

Chapman said he had mixed feelings about the document.

He was pleased it signalled a move away from balanced literacy towards structured literacy but disappointed that this section had been “condensed” and lacked detail.

Phase two will be released later this year and include more detail on how the strategies would look in the classroom.

The Government’s maths action plan, published last year, signals some content currently taught in later years will be brought forward into children’s first three years of schooling.

There will also be a recommended and minimum amount of time spent on maths each week, teachers will get more guidance on how to teach maths, “incentives, training and improved career pathways” will be used to increase the maths teacher workforce and there will be specific attention to learners who currently struggle.