Policy wonks have found that summer learning loss, an established side-effect of long school holidays, is particularly pronounced in some groups:

…children from the poorest backgrounds suffered most with ’summer learning loss’ because they were the least likely to practise reading and writing during the six-week break.

The Education Guardian has reported on plans from think-tank The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) to shorten the long summer holidays. This should interest parents from any wealth bracket – without the right attention even the most expensively educated can suffer.

Further to this, long term times might be causing ‘burn out’ in some students.

A co-author of the IPPR study, Sonia Sodha, calls for a five-term system, with two-week breaks between eight-week terms, and a month for summer hols.

Many parents remember their long summer holidays with fondness, even though the original purpose of the long break – to allow children to return to farms for the picking season – has almost entirely been forgotten, certainly in practice.

Margaret Morrissey of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations argues that children may also need “…a chance to recharge their batteries”; but one could well argue that if the terms weren’t so long, children’s batteries wouldn’t need recharging in the first place.

(As of 2010) Former Children’s Minister Kevin Brennan said the IPPR report (which also includes recommendations on increasing the role of play in classes for 5 and 6 year-olds and suggestions that secondary and primary schools employ in-house counsellors or use counselling networks) matches commitments made in the coming ‘Children’s Plan’.

Keeping children constructively entertained over summer is an issue, whether or not the Children’s Plan includes shortening the summer holidays. The finding that unstructured holidays can lead to ‘learning loss’ is still relevant, and is something we recognise. In 2007, Whizz Education launched our Summer Adventure – featuring the Professor lost in the jungle. Students were charged with helping him escape, by solving maths puzzles and playing jungle-themed games.

(a maths puzzle from the 2007 Summer Adventure)

The Summer Adventure was a huge success – Maths-Whizz students at Mead School, Kent, had a great day helping the Professor escape from the jungle when Toni Burkett and Monique Kleinschmidt from Whizz visited with prizes for their top-performing students.

(Our 2007 Summer Adventure in use at the Mead School, Tunbrdge Wells)

Our Summer (and Christmas) adventures encourage students to continue learning with Maths-Whizz; students must finish lessons before they can try the themed games, and they get to learn about jungle creatures with our colourful worksheets.

We’ll be bringing back the Prof and his rainforest antics each Summer, with brand new features. If you’re wondering how to keep your child occupied this summer, make sure he or she logs onto Maths-Whizz, because the Professor isn’t going to escape from the Mayan jungle all by himself…

[UPDATE: Read a study of 39 investigations into Summer Learning Loss]

[Read more about summer learning loss - Wikipedia]
 

But as it’s all in a good cause – raising money for the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) – I suggest you watch, enjoy, and check out the charity’s good work.

The video was made at Surrey’s Amesbury School, with the help of students, teachers, and parents.
Good show!

A test administered by researchers for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme found that:

Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.

As The Telegraph points out, ‘The material covered in the Dispatches test is contained in the primary national curriculum…’. And this chimes, rather sadly, with our long-held assertion that most adults have a maths age of 10 or 11. This is late Key Stage 2 – primary – maths, never mind GCSE.

In itself that might be worrying, but that we only ask a C-grade maths GCSE of new Primary school teachers implies that pedagogy and method is more important than knowledge and the confidence that comes from skill.

The God of Maths is a firm believer in the idea that you don’t have to know everything to teach excellently. Just as a good manager should always hope that he promotes his subordinates’ skills above his, a teacher should hope that his charges eventually over-take him. He just has to light the fire.

Despite this, something you cannot fake or rationalise away is a basic confidence and competence in a subject, and if significant numbers of primary teachers really are failing questions like these below, we ought to worry:

• 1.4 ÷ 0.1
• 2.1% of 400
• ABCDE is a pentagon. Name all its diagonals
• 7/16 + 3/4
• The mean height of a group of 4 people is 2 metres. One more person joins the group and then the mean height is 1.9 metres. What is the height of the new person?

‘A little fun can go a long way when it comes to learning‘.

We can’t argue with the sentiment, as it is one of the key principles that has informed Maths-Whizz development – if you do something you enjoy, you’ll do it well, even maths tutoring. It’s just up to the educator to help make the subject engaging. The Independent took a closer look at one of the country’s most ‘value added’ primary schools – Blue Bell Hill, in Nottingham – that seems to have taken this maxim to heart:

“We take them ice-skating or to a pantomime – or do dance and drama with them,” said headteacher Jo Bradley. It is not the usual recipe for ensuring good performance by 11-year-olds in national curriculum tests. But at a time when a growing number of schools are recording figures showing that more than half their pupils fail to reach the required standard in maths and English – 885 this year compared with 798 in 2008 – it is surprisingly effective.

Blue Bell Hill consistently outperformed expectations for a student body that is largely very poor, with many non-English-speakers. This is especially good, given that standards nationally seem to have slipped – with 79% of schools hitting expected targets, down from 80% last year.

Whilst the Independent’s headline attributes the high performance to simply having fun, it’s clear that the school’s consistent and dedicated leadership has played a large part in ensuring that standardised tests that receive so much scorn from teachers and parents alike needn’t necessarily be a roadblock, for even the most needy of students.

Hensingham Primary School, in particular, used the money to subscribe to Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools. Pupils now…

…carry out graded maths activities after assessment in school and continue them at home in a fun manner.

As Whitehaven News notes:

The equipment has proved to be very popular and in the short time they have been in school there has been an increased enthusiasm for reading and maths which speaks for itself.

We’re sure the South Whitehaven Partnership’s money has been well-spent!

Vaques and lapins do Maths-Whizz

Ormer House is one of the smallest schools on our books, but it’s testament (we hope!) to the quality of Maths-Whizz that they’ve opted to invest in our Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools service, and convinced the generous people behind Trover Coats (purveyors of all-weather coats to classy canines) to stump up the cash. They’ve even gone as far as to write about it in the local newspaper, and we’ve copied their article below.

A Big thanks to Ormer House for giving us some local recognition, and if Whizz had a doggy mascot, he’d be wearing a burgundy red Bone Dry.

Bone Dry!

Read on for the whole article.

Maths-Whizz is successful in Ormer House School

An initiative that has been introduced to the children of Ormer House has been given the thumbs up by the pupils, parents and their ICT teacher. “Maths-Whizz is a website that allows the children to develop their maths skills as well as their Information Communication Technology skills said Elaine Cathcart, ICT Teacher.

Each child who receives ICT classes has been enrolled on the website and the subscription has kindly been paid by a local company – Trover Coats.

The children were originally tested at the start of the new term to identify their own personal academic maths level. Lessons were then geared around that level and children learnt new maths concepts via build up exercises with the help of Miss Cathcart and they progressed at their own pace.

After each new concept has been explained on the computer to the child, they then undertake a small interactive exam and credits are given depending on the results of the exam. Children save up their credits and visit the interactive Maths-Whizz shop to purchase all sorts of goodies ranging from cuddly toys to virtual pets. They must also buy food for these pets and feed them regularly. “This develops their monetary skills and gives them responsibility for feeding their pets” explained Miss Cathcart. Each child has a virtual bedroom and can decorate this using their imagination as well as read any new letters they receive on their notice board. Reading skills are also developing during these lessons.

Parents also work at home with their children on the Maths-Whizz website. They can track their child’s progress and give support and help when required during lessons. The report card facility is checked every week by the teacher and shows how long each child has spent on lessons at home, how much progress has been achieved or if remediation work was necessary. Many of the children are now working at an age level higher than their actual age – this information is shown on the report card.

The children are very enthusiastic when working on Maths-Whizz because they know each time they move on to a new concept they can build up more credits which allows them to have fun in the Maths-Whizz shop.

From the FT:

Inquiries by maths experts about teacher training places have soared as the credit crunch tightens, official data obtained by the Financial Times show.

[Skeletor - formerly of Lehman Brothers, now teaching Year 6 maths in Didsbury]

Michael Watkins, TDA’s head of recruitment, told the Financial Times “bigger numbers are turning to teaching than ever before”.

Those men and women, formerly the toast of the city and dubbed ‘Masters of the Universe’, have lately been brought low by the financial crisis and recession. In times of difficulty, skilled workers often turn to the stable sectors including, of course, teaching.

This was predicted by many last year, and I have secretly been hoping that some of the brains behind credit asset-swaps and fiendishly clever derivatives will turn their skills towards an industry that rewards the soul (if not enlarge the wallet…).

Mr Watkins even calculated that the quality of applicants may have improved. He pointed out that many of those who were planning to move from a financial services career into teaching were bringing more than just strong academic achievement.

He surmised that in subjects such as maths and economics, individuals who had first-hand experience in the application of a theory carried a significant advantage when it came to teaching it.

But the FT piece ended with a caveat:

…cynics might suggest that the credit crunch shows a knowledge of advanced maths can be more dangerous than no knowledge of maths at all.

Does this mean we’ll have another generation of financial wizards leaving school in years to come? Who knows, but if nothing else the presence of thousands more highly-motivated intelligent men and women who know how maths is used in the ‘real’ world must surely be a good thing.

It can’t be too much to hope that these former masters of the universe will still need fun maths classroom tools and tutoring software to remind them that before you can package up sub-prime mortgages, you need to learn how to partition two-digit numbers…

Tests for 11-year-olds will remain, at least until the Key Stage 2 tests have been evaluated as part of a new review process that will investigate the KS3 tests’ replacements. These SATs tests might be replaced by New York-style quality report cards – the BBC news site has a short introduction to the New York reports here.

This summer’s marking fiasco has made many understandably wary of SATs, and it seems Balls’ response will prove popular with teachers and students alike. As Donald MacLeod, on the Guardian Mortarboard blog, writes:

That sounds rather as if the days of all Sats are numbered in England – they have already gone in Wales and never existed in Scotland – in favour of testing when the teacher thinks the child is ready. This system is already being piloted. Good news all round?

This is an exciting development, because it brings the animation and interactivity of good teaching software to children in a way they will find intuitive. Students will be able to manipulate virtual objects just as if they were moving things around a table.

This has the added classroom benefit of allowing children to use a computer more as they use a desk, rather than being locked into eye-contact with a computer monitor, shut off from peers and teachers.

The SynergyNet system being devised to make the most of this technology in education has the aim, as ScienceDaily puts it, of ”…achieving active student engagement and learning by sharing, problem-solving and creating.” This will effectively “integrate ICT into the fabric of the classroom.”

Rather than ’simple’ interactive whiteboard or touch-screen systems which respond only to one finger or pointer at a time, multi-touch displays lets the user employ as many digits or appendages as he or she chooses.

Seen to well-publicised effect on Apple’s iPhone, multi-touch allows you to ‘grab’ onscreen items and throw them around, ‘pinch’, twist and turn objects as if they were stacks of paper on a real desk, or albums in a rack.

We’ll be intrigued to see if Multi-touch interfaces work with Maths-Whizz.

As the BBC reports, 25 million papers are taken in an annual orgy of testing that, the committee argues, risks placing too much emphasis on too few types of test and on teaching to the test.

More damningly, the report states:

…that the single-level tests’ “one-way ratchet” system will lead to an “artificial” improvement in results, in which pupils will be “certified to have achieved a level of knowledge and understanding which they do not in truth possess”.

Barry Sheerman and his committee are stating, in part, that some types of national testing are circular – improvement in the tests is taken as validation of those tests and so students do more tests. We can’t really say if students have learned anything by the end of that process.

A key recommendation of the committee seems to be the that whilst testing per se is not damaging, the use of those tests to create schools performance table, is. The BBC piece notes the report argues that “…accountability should be based on a wider range of measures, including Ofsted reports.”

John Dunford, leader of the head teachers’ union ASCL expresses the frustration of many in the teaching profession with with the current profusion of tests, and how that information is used:

“The original purpose of examinations, to assess students’ progress, has become confused with school accountability and the performance management of teachers,”

The conclusions of the select committee and the opinions of the likes of Dr. Dunford we heartily agree with. This seems to boil down to an issue we’ve long recognised, and have had to take into account designing Maths-Whizz and in the valuable reports we put together for parents, students and teachers alike:

All you can say with honesty about a test is that it measures a student’s ability to take that test.

It sounds truistic, obvious, but when you think about it this argument is a dangerous one to follow to its extremes – after all, by what standards might we measure performance, what information is relevant to an understanding of ability and learning, if we take this statement at face value?

When students learn with Maths-Whizz animated exercises and test themselves with Maths-Whizz exam-style questions we know that there are two things at work:

• The student is, first, learning the subject - the basic maths he or she needs to develop educationally and to use in everyday life.
• Second, the student is learning the technique for answering the question, whether that involves knowing what to write, when, or learning which button to click.

When the second skill takes precendence over the first, the system has failed to measure knowledge or performance in any meaningful way.

Of course, for many students rote learning of technique can make up for a lack of understanding. You can know how to perform long division – and use that skill to good effect in everday life - without understanding why it works, or how. Likewise, I don’t need to know the inverse square law in order to understand that gravity keeps me sitting here.

But – and this is vital – if our testing system ends up valuing method over knowledge, by design or by accident, then we need to re-evaluate the testing system. If the method of SATs tests is all about how to answer SATS tests, then we have a problem.

We like to think Maths-Whizz gives students the tools and the confidence to take their maths learning beyond the computer screen. Parents tell us all the time that our exercises and exam-style questions are making their children do better in class. We would be failing in our jobs if it turned out that all Maths-Whizz students could do was answer Maths-Whizz questions; thankfully, the evidence shows anything but.

In the end, though, we know that no child is going to understand all the intricacies of maths just by logging into Maths-Whizz, just as no child is going to understand the implications of gravity by watching electronic apples fall from electronic trees. Everything our students learn has to have a life outside Maths-Whizz.