The gaping gap in learning maths

For most school students, mathematics remains one of the most challenging subjects to master. Parents find it equally daunting, especially as the child goes to higher classes.

These fears are not unfounded. A year-long study of 75,000 middle school students (those studying in classes 6-10) by Countingwell, an ed-tech start-up, showed that a lot of students exhibit poor comprehension skills for maths problems, which directly contribute to the drastic fall in their maths scores from Class 7 onwards. On average, just 28% of the students showcase good comprehension skills and almost 72% of them face problems while comprehending word problems.

These findings are surprising to those who tend to think that poor calculation abilities are the big reason why students fear maths and get poor scores. The basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication or division do form the foundation of maths learning, but the subject gets far more abstract after Class 6.

More importantly, the maths syllabus and learning in the early classes do not require students to do any actual calculations. On the contrary, it is focused on making young minds understand simple concepts like shapes, quantities (less-more, greater-smaller), and other concepts that are communicated through language in various forms.

Modelling the problem

As students advance to higher classes, the focus of educators, parents and students, unfortunately, digresses from a better understanding of concepts to efficacy in calculating skills. But there are other gaps in maths learning that begin to show from Class 7 onwards.

The study found that after language comprehension, most students found the modelling of maths problems a challenging task. Only 39% of the monitored students were able to model problems as given in tests or exams accurately. This was the study’s big reveal — a drastic drop in students’ performance in maths, starting from Class 7 onwards.

The reasons are not difficult to decipher. From Class 7 onwards, the mathematical concepts included in the syllabus tend to become more abstract. Students often need to use multiple concepts to solve a single problem. Further, the study showed a decline in parents’ involvement in teaching maths, which is understandable as parents also find it hard to explain complex and abstract concepts easily to their children. Further, nearly one in five was found to forget the basic calculation skills learnt in previous classes by the time he/she reached Class 6.

No rural-urban divide

The trend remained the same irrespective of where the students came from — small or big cities. The supposed difference in maths proficiency among students of big cities and those from small or remote towns proved to be mythical in the study. It found that students from Tier-II and Tier-III cities were at par with students of metros or Tier-I cities. Those from cities like Varanasi, Madurai, Jabalpur or Nashik were found to be performing in maths as well as their counterparts studying in Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru.

The report’s findings also counter another widely-held belief that boys are distinctly better at studying or mastering maths than girls. The difference in maths knowledge, calculation or modelling was insignificant, even though boys scored better than girls at comprehension.

The report holds a mirror to the huge gap in learning concepts that need to be addressed. Educators and schools along with parents must heed early signs of learning gaps, particularly in language comprehension skills, and work with students to address them.

Some of the findings are also a testament to how ed-tech has democratised learning and is helping students bridge culture, gender and demographic divides.

(The writer is the co-founder of an ed-tech startup)