'Attitudes' key to improving Ontario math scores, says expert

A Wilfrid Lauriermath professor and co-director of a group of educators tasked with improving Ontario's troubled math curriculum says the attitudes of teachers, students and parents need to change in order to create better outcomes at provincial schools.

Half of all grade six students failed to meet the provincial standard in math in 2015, according to the most recent numbers from Ontario's Education Quality and Accountability Office.

Those same numbers also suggest many high school students are earning diplomas while still having trouble adding fractions or multiplying without the aid of a calculator.

"What we're seeing is that teachers and ultimately students are struggling and parents are struggling," Wilfrid Laurier math professor and co-director of the Ontario-wide math knowledge networkDonna Kotsopolous told The Morning Edition guest host Colin Butler Monday.

The network aims to use research to enhance how math is learned and taught in Ontario schools and is part of a wider effort on behalf of the province to address low math scores, which Kotsopoulos said have nothing to do with students' abilities.

Most of us can do math

"The research tells us that94 per cent of people can do perfectly well, it's really a very small proportion of people that have a math disability per se," she said.

"The number one factor has always come down to the quality of the teaching.It's the experiences you've had not only throughout your education, but also the quality of the engagement you've had with your parents."

"I often say to parents 'this is the best time to lie about your beliefs'because it impacts your children," Kotsopoulis said.

"So when you say to them that you're not good at it, when you say to them you're not interested in it, when you say to them you have these challenges,as true as they may be, what we see from the research is the children pick up on this and take some ownership when really, it doesn't need to be their reality."

The Math Knowledge Network program involves several Ontariouniversities, educators' groups and mathematical societies, created in 2016 by the Ministry of Education to raise overall math test results by targeting math teachers and students.

"We know a lot about what works in teaching math and we need to make sure that this knowledge is widely shared across our system," provincial educationminister Mitzie Hunter said in November.