How the pandemic affected math learning in Oregon schools

Data released by the Oregon Department of Education in the fall showed that student proficiency rates for mathematics dropped to about 30%.

At the same time, investments championed by Gov. Tina Kotek will bring $100 million to schools to address literacy and early learning reading. But should the same investments be made into other subjects like math? What needs to be done to help kids catch up?

To answer these questions and more, we’re joined by Brenda Lindsay, the K-6 math facilitator for the Forest Grove School District. Allison Samuel is the math facilitator for grades 7-12 there. We’ll also hear from Nicole Rigelman, a math education professor at Portland State University.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Math scores plummeted in Oregon during the pandemic and they still have not recovered. According to the most recent state data, only 30% of Oregon students were proficient in math last spring. It’s a lot worse than the, already disappointing, 43% who passed their English Language Arts tests. Despite the fact that the Legislature and the governor have focused a lot more on reading instruction than any other single subject. We’re going to hear about what’s happening in one Oregon district today and we’ll talk about broader efforts to improve the state’s math education and math results. Brenda Lindsay is the K-6 math facilitator for the Forest Grove School District. Allison Samuel focuses on math in grades 7-12 for the district. And Nicole Rigelman is a math education professor at Portland State University. Welcome to all three of you.

All: Thank you.

Miller: Allison Samuel, I want to start with what happened four years ago at this point, something like that. We’ve heard a lot of the ways that reading was affected by the pandemic. Can you just give us a sense for what math instruction looked like when all of school was online?

Allison Samuel: Well, it was very difficult for students to have the same level of classroom conversation and discussion, even though we were using the tools that we had online to do classroom conversations in different breakout rooms. It just wasn’t the same way as you would facilitate it in a physical classroom. And students weren’t used to working with that kind of technology and it was a lot easier for them to opt out, not discuss, and not put their cameras on. So our overall classroom discussion was a lot lower during the pandemic.

Miller: And what does classroom discussion look like normally or sound like normally when it comes to a math class? I guess I feel like, if someone said, imagine a scenario which is a class discussion in some, any kind of K-12 setting, I think I might imagine a history class or a science class or maybe a literature class. What does discussion mean in the math context?

Samuel: In a math classroom, a lot of it is sharing ideas. Most math problems that we have, have more than one way to get to the same answer or solution. Or there might be a problem that has multiple possible solutions. And so really having students be able to talk about their thinking and how they’re approaching a problem, or maybe where they’re stuck on a problem, and comparing their answers or approaches and, “Gee we got the same answer but got to it a different way.” Or maybe [they] looked at this problem differently, and approached it in a different way, and got a completely different answer. So it’s really for students to really talk about their thinking in mathematics. And we talk about it, to get that kind of thought process out loud.

Miller: And Brenda Lindsay, from the slightly younger student perspective, let’s say for a first grader in April of 2020 or a second grader the following entire school year, what might math instruction have been like for those younger students?

Brenda Lindsay: Between the pandemic, before and after the pandemic, it was very hard when we went into the pandemic to have any concrete representations in math, which is extremely important for our younger students. So all of the counters and manipulatives and all of those wonderful math tools that they have in the classroom to make math come alive, really left.

Miller: Oh, you mean literally physical stuff that a teacher could use or a kid could hold in their hand to understand, in a concrete way, mathematical concepts?

Lindsay: That is how we start learning math in the early grade levels. And it really leads to a lack of conceptual understanding, because there’s nothing concrete to build upon.

Miller: In other words, stuff just gets less and less concrete as you go more and more,

I don’t know, almost philosophical. But you’re saying if you don’t start with a concrete basis, there’s almost nothing to build on in your head?

Lindsay: It is literally like a building. The foundation starts to crumble, student’s confidence in their math abilities goes away. And they’re less likely to jump in and be risk takers and try to solve difficult problems. They will just stand back and participation goes way down.

Miller: Nicole Rigelman, what we’ve just heard so far, we’re still sort of diagnosing the problem of where we were. I mean, it sounds almost like a recipe for holding kids back from learning math. What does the data show in terms of how the pandemic years affected math education?

Nicole Rigelman: As you mentioned at the outset, we saw a decline in student math achievement. And I believe Portland Public Schools may have been the only district, or among a very few number of districts, that was called out as actually seeing gains since the pandemic and really trying to unpack what’s contributing to that. Brenda was mentioning that lack of opportunity to make the connection between the symbols you’re working with in math and the actual quantities, or operating on those quantities. Allison was talking about the discourse and making sense of ideas and multiple ideas. I know of a lot of teachers who didn’t want to show more than one way because they were worried about the confusion that might ensue when a student might be sitting at home, behind a computer, by themselves and, unable to have somebody support them with some struggle that they might experience. But I think another factor that I didn’t hear in either one of their comments, but maybe they could speak to, is the amount of time people spent on math during the pandemic compared to what we would normally recommend for math instruction.

Miller: Allison Samuel, for the middle and older grades, was there just a raw number difference in terms of the minutes or hours spent on math in the pandemic?

Samuel: There was at first. I would say when we first went into distance learning mode, none of us really knew what we were doing. So we just kind of muddled our way through as best we could. And we were really focusing a lot on the social, emotional support that students needed during that time. Often, people think of just the younger kids as needing that, but our older kids need that just as much.

But we did shift to where we were going through a modified full schedule for our secondary students. So they were getting math minutes. But our attendance was much lower. And so, while we may have had the sheer minutes available, the number of students who actually partook of all of those minutes was drastically different.

Miller: The pieces of the pie were the same but fewer kids were eating them?

Samuel: Yes.

Miller: Brenda Lindsay, testing in the middle of the pandemic found that less than one-fifth of Forest Grove students were at or above grade level in math. That was below the state average at the time. How are you doing right now in terms of a district, across the board, cumulative test look?

Lindsay: Well, one bright spot that we have in the District is that our kindergartners are coming to us. They came to us in the fall with scores that were right around the pre-pandemic national average. And then their growth, from fall to winter this year, has been following pre-pandemic national average trends, which we were thrilled to see.

However, for our students who have been negatively impacted by this pandemic, getting them to engage in math is extremely difficult. They had multiple years where really, as Allison kind of hit upon, there was no control if those students were going to participate or not. As we have right now, we have our cameras off. We are paying attention but there’s really no control to say, “If I chose to check out and not listen to my teacher teach math,” there wasn’t much a teacher could do.

Miller: Yeah, I should say right now we are talking and the three of you are on Zoom, in a radio show. Without the camera on that’s no big deal. But if you stopped paying attention, it’d be very clear, very quickly, because there would be simply no answers.

But I want to go back to the kindergarten data because, actually, that is interesting. So if the pandemic started a little more than four years ago, we’re talking about kids who were maybe one, maybe two [years old] at the beginning of it. Maybe they had some disrupted preschool, if they went to preschool. But then life more or less evened out. And you’re saying that they arrived at the very beginning of kindergarten, their knowledge of basic mathematical concepts was at pre-pandemic levels, and they’ve been doing pretty well, so far through the spring.

What does that tell you about how instruction is working for kids who didn’t have severely disrupted lives?

Lindsay: Right and I think a lot of our students who went through the pandemic, have extreme anxiety and they have anxiety around math. Those kids who were learning virtually, had a surface level understanding, and they had a lot of missing gaps, and a lot of missing foundational skills. So they know that they’re coming into that classroom already far behind. And when you already come into a classroom and you feel like, “Wow I don’t know all that I’m supposed to know to be excelling in this classroom,” then quite often students are unwilling to even attempt problems, unless they’re absolutely confident that they’re going to be successful at the outcome.

Miller: Nicole Rigelman, I want to turn to the question of anxiety about this particular subject. I think that’s an issue that’s not necessarily going to be a surprise to older listeners, people who went to school years or decades before the pandemic. To what extent is general anxiety about math as a subject an issue that gets in the way of learning math?

Rigelman: I think just as was described, it can make a learner hesitant to engage in something that they’re not confident they already know how to do. There’s actually research that’s been done on students who have an opportunity to learn math with understanding. So understanding the concepts, understanding procedures, and why they work. They actually have a more positive identity in mathematics. And when we talk to a lot of adults around the nation, you hear stories of various points in time where they might have opted out of math because they decided they weren’t any good when they didn’t do well on timed tests or when they got to algebra or when they got to calculus.

Different people have different stories, but there are these places in time where they hit that math doesn’t make sense. And so really thinking about the strategies, like Allison and Brenda have mentioned so far, where we develop that understanding by using and interacting with models and interacting with others around our ideas about how to solve math problems. That’s gonna be what develops that deep understanding and that strong math identity simultaneously.

Miller: Do you think that there is something about math that makes it sort of particularly susceptible to this? I guess I just don’t remember it being nearly as common for people to say versions of, “I’m just not good at English,” or “I’m just not good at X.” Whereas that was relatively common when it came to math, in particular. Why do you think that is?

Rigelman: Might it be a cultural phenomenon?

Miller: Maybe. I’m asking you because you’re the one who studies math education.

Rigelman: I mean, I would argue that we’ve made it OK for people to say that and to say they’re not a ‘math person’. And so what we really need is a campaign out there with the public to help people understand that math is a topic that can make sense. Math is a topic that can be exciting and innovative and creative and all those things that a lot of people would never use as adjectives to describe mathematics as a subject. And it has everything to do with how they learned mathematics.

Miller: Allison Samuel, how do you do that at the middle school or high school level?

Samuel: A lot of it comes back to taking time for class discourse and having students share their ideas together and talk about math, giving them problems that they can really want to solve, that they’re interested in solving, that gives them a chance to maybe approach problems in different ways. I think part of what leads to math anxiety is that it’s seen as a subject [for which] there is a right answer and there is a wrong answer.

And so if you don’t get the right answer, then you’re not good at math. But if we focus more on the thought process and how we go about solving problems and how we can approach them differently, how we can even understand the problem itself in different contexts, I think leads to this idea of math as being more of a thinking subject rather than just there’s a right answer and a wrong answer.

Miller: But I know there’s a part of me who’s imagining math as a building block for say, civil engineering or physics or biotech and that part is saying, but isn’t there also a right answer that really matters in so many contexts? How do you thread that needle, where you don’t want to quash creativity or make it so students are afraid of or hate a subject, but you also want to make sure that there is rigor and specificity and that, at some point, the right answer does matter?

Samuel: Yes, it’s a fine line we get to try to walk. I used to be the calculus teacher before I became a math facilitator. So I had a lot of students that were going into engineering and there is a right answer. But I think, at that level, you start talking about sometimes there’s more than one way to get to an answer, a more efficient way to get to an answer. Brenda talked earlier about fact fluency. And fluency in math isn’t just about how fast you can do things. But it’s also about how efficient or fluid you can be with the different methods to do things. And so, yes there’s a right answer, but there could be more than one way to get to the right answer.

Maybe one way is more efficient than another. But students having those conversations when they do have the wrong answer, having the conversation be more about the instead of just, “Here copy down my work because this is how you get the answer seven,” instead of this is the understanding, this is how you do this. I mean, you still need to get to the answer seven. But we can focus our conversations more around how we get there, why, and what our thinking is rather than just the answer ‘seven, copy down the steps and put seven.’

Miller: So Brenda Lindsay, to drill down a little bit into what you’re doing at the District to try to respond to… maybe crisis is too strong a word… but a pretty serious situation where you’re trying to collectively crawl out of the pandemic-created hole. What kinds of interventions are there to help students who, for all the reasons we’ve talked about, many of them lack a kind of math foundation right now. Where do you start?

Lindsay: Well, you need to start first with a mathematical mindset and let all of our students know that everyone has a math mind. There’s not, “You are a math person and I am not.” We’re all math people. And you also need to show students that math is all around them.

Miller: Then how do you do that? Let’s say I’m a third grader. How do you convince me both that I’m a math person and also that math is all around me?

Lindsay: There’s a lot of ways we could do it. For example, if we’re studying equivalent fractions and I have a graham cracker. I can give you half of it or I can give you two-fourths of it or I can give you four-eighths of it or, do you see where I’m going?

Miller: Four-eighths sounds better. That sounds like more of a cookie to me.

OK, so the first thing is the culture, to show people that math matters and that they’re a part of it. What follows?

Lindsay: Then in the younger grades, we have to model for our students how to have mathematical conversations. And that includes having a discussion or even a disagreement, without it just being, “You’re wrong. I’m right. Here you go.” We have to teach our kids how to actually talk and have rich mathematical conversations. It’s a skill and we do need to make sure that everybody understands that all ideas are welcomed, but we may not always agree.

And then we also have to give them the foundational skills, so that they can build upon their mathematical ideas. For example, fact fluency is something that’s very important in our District. And we’ve actually extended our one-hour math block to include an additional 15 minutes at grades K-4, so that students can work on their basic math facts, their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Because we now know that with having fluent facts, we are able to reduce our cognitive load when we’re learning new math. So it’s much easier for me to understand what the teacher is talking about if I understand that 6x7=42.

Miller: To go back to your graham cracker analogy. I mean, if you’re not increasing the number of minutes in the instructional day, something has to give, right? And this gets to priorities. If you’re putting 15 more minutes for some kids for math, does that mean that that something is getting 15 minutes fewer?

Lindsay: Possibly. However, we’ve gotten very creative about blending social studies and reading together. So our reading is a 90-minute block. But 30 minutes of that is background knowledge. And we’ve started figuring out if we can embed one concept or one practice into another, for example, social studies and reading – if we can embed those two things, we’ve just saved ourselves 30 minutes.

Miller: Nicole Rigelman, as I mentioned briefly at the top, the statewide policy context for this conversation is that the state, with Governor Kotek as a champion and a number of lawmakers pushing for this, have really been investing a lot more money in reading education. Both a hundred million dollars to do this but also an effort to change the way reading is taught, based on what we’ve heard of the science of reading. Is there any kind of mathematics analog to that national movement?

Rigelman: What I would say is in the broadest general sense, there is a science of learning. And then that gets applied, as we think about content areas like reading, like mathematics. There could be a science of science and the science of social studies, as well. It is the case that there is a movement beginning, to articulate expectations, related to the science of math. And I think, in the same sort of ways, that legislation, if it would come to point, there are some things that have been talked about today in terms of what effective mathematics instruction looks like that may or may not be a piece of the puzzle, so to speak, in terms of instruction.

Miller: You’re speaking carefully, which I appreciate. But are you not on board with what is now being called the science of math or the curricula that might follow from that emerging discipline?

Rigelman: I think that we need to be cautious about just adopting what’s out there, for example, on the website right now for the science of math. Because I would say that it doesn’t take into account a broad body of research. It’s looking at particular research, much of which has been done around students who struggle with mathematics. And, just like there’s no one-size-fits-all curriculum, there’s no-one-size-fits-all approach to teaching students either. And there are some statements on that site that would suggest, “Oh, if we do this, this will fix everything.” And I think that that’s a little bit of a dangerous mentality to have. And I worry about the potential impact that it could have on student’s identity development and even teacher identity development.

Miller: So Brenda Lindsay, we didn’t go too far down this question of potential curriculum changes. But the broader picture there is of the top Oregon officials collectively saying, “There’s a kind of emergency, in terms of the state of reading education, or reading levels in K-12 schools and we’re going to do something about it.” And I haven’t seen an equivalent for math. Should there be?

Lindsay: Yes, absolutely. There should be. We definitely need, if we expect better results, to provide more resources. And you’ve hit upon those both in the area of time, money, and professional development. There’s definitely got to be more of a focus on math and its importance in the daily schedule and for the daily lives of our students.

Rigelman: Can I add on to that as well?

Miller: Please do.

Rigelman: I would also say math intervention, because for years and years when I have talked to my students who are practicing teachers in the classes that I teach, I will ask them about their math intervention program and they’ll just look at me and say, “We don’t have one.”

Miller: What is an intervention program?

Lindsay: So an intervention is going to be focusing on small groups of students, giving them a little more individualized attention, and focusing on those foundational skills that they might be missing. Those are possibly previous grade level skills that they need to have to build upon their mathematical learning.

Miller: And when Nicole Riegelman says that her students, who are themselves math teachers in various schools, say, “We don’t have a math intervention program,” what does that mean?

Lindsay: Well, I’m guessing that means that they have the one hour block to teach all, approximately 30 children. And they don’t have an outside block, like they do in reading, of 20 minutes four times a week to pull those specific students to work on those struggling skills. And that is done outside of the reading block, just as it should be outside of the math block.

Rigelman: And they don’t have the extra personnel related to it either.

Miller: Right, so it becomes, first, a question of funding. If there isn’t somebody who can actually be staffing those math interventions, you can’t pull the kid out to give them nothing.

Rigelman: Right.

Miller: Allison Samuel, one of the reasons that we’ve heard there has been such an effort – and we’ll see what kind of fruit these reading interventions or policy changes bear in the coming years – but the reason that lawmakers and the governor have been able to push successfully for this is because they would make arguments saying things like, “The data shows that if kids aren’t reading at grade level in third grade, then they’re, x-times percent more likely to not graduate, or to not be reading at grade level or doing well when they get older or…” Any number of things that can be tied to early evidence of problems with reading. Is it the same with math? Is there data to show that we know if you’re not doing well with math at this grade, this is more likely?

Samuel: There is data that shows that in third grade and fifth grade in particular, I’ve seen, if students are not at grade level on this, according to the state assessment, that they are less likely to graduate from high school, that they’re less likely to come into the ninth grade on track, and then therefore less likely to actually eventually graduate.

Rigelman: Yeah and I would say, building on that, some elementary-focused research has been done on early childhood mathematics. So this might be more of the K-4 that Brenda was talking about. And early childhood mathematics is actually a predictor of success, not only in future mathematics but also in other subject areas. And so I think a lot of people hold the perspective that if we don’t have our kids reading, then they can’t do anything. And I would argue that you could say the same thing for math. If we don’t have them doing math and engaging as mathematicians, then they miss opportunities in the future.

Miller: Nicole Rigelman, Allison Samuel and Brenda Lindsay, thanks very much.

All: Thank you.

Miller: Nicole Rigelman is a professor of math education at Portland State University. Allison Samuel is the grades 7-12 math facilitator for the Forest Grove School District. Brenda Lindsay is the grades K-6 math facilitator at that district.

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