The Role of Data in Math Reform

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final article in a series of articles looking at the national debate on math instruction and its potential impact on Virginia and APS. Stanford Education Professor Jo Boaler has drawn national attention with her calls to decelerate math instruction. This installment dives deeper into how the push for additional data science has led to large amounts of culling from existing math content.

Data Science Poses Challenges for Virginia’s Math SOL revision

Data science has become a battlefield for state math reforms. While there is broad support for offering more courses in data literacy and statistics, there is debate on how best to do this. Reformers generally favor scaling back traditional math content to make room for data science whereas STEM professionals prefer data science courses are taken in addition to traditional math courses.

The Virginia Math Pathways Initiative (VMPI) appeared to aggressively cut out traditional math content to make room for new data analysis and pedagogical reforms and the VA Council for Math Supervision (VCMS) seems to be recommending that approach for Virginia’s 2023 Math SOL revision as well. STEM professors warn that such aggressive action could undermine the traditional math pathway, jeopardize conceptual understanding, and make it more difficult for students to pursue STEM subjects later.  

Why Data Science?

There is broad support for increasing data science offerings. Data literacy and statistics are increasingly useful for school projects, employment, and other post-secondary endeavors. However, the key question is whether they should be offered in addition to or in place of traditional math. Two differing views can be seen here and here.

Math reformers often favor replacing traditional math content with data science since they believe the traditional math pathway is inequitable and a barrier to college admission for underrepresented students. Algebra II is particularly disliked given its reputation as a “weed-out” course, with Stanford Education Professor Jo Boaler deeming it an “awful” course in FOIAed emails. In contrast, reformers believe data science enhances equity because it appeals to a broader range of students with its culturally relevant and engaging topics.

Math reformers note that roughly one-third of college graduates receive a quantitative degree; while the Algebra – Calculus path makes sense for them, data science could make more sense for the rest. However, this view assumes that we know which high school students are STEM-bound; but we don’t. Students change career goals and majors and underrepresented students may be inspired to pursue a STEM path once they have access to well-endowed college facilities. That is why high schools have traditionally had all students take math through Algebra II (and ideally Precalculus) so that they retain the flexibility to pursue any major in college.

STEM professionals and academics generally prefer data science be taken in addition to traditional math, not as its replacement. They note that while data science is useful, skills like data cleaning, downloading and uploading are not a replacement for traditional math. Just as typing is generally not taught in English class, spreadsheet use should not be taught in math class.

How Should Data Science be Handled?

There have been a range of recent proposals for incorporating data science into high school curricula:

·       This past spring, Virginia approved a new Standard of Learning for Data Science; this stand-alone course will be offered in addition to traditional math courses and will be piloted in high schools this school year.

·       California proposed a new data science pathway as an alternative to the traditional pathway. However, that idea bogged down amidst concerns that underrepresented students would be tracked into the less rigorous data science pathway. 

Another alternative is to “merge and purge” traditional math content to make space for data science. Reformers often suggest pruning Algebra II given the partial overlap between Algebra II and Precalculus content and the ability to replace many manual Algebra II calculations with a calculator/computer.  STEM professionals and professors urge caution with aggressive “merge and purge”, eliminating redundancies in Algebra II and Precalculus, and dropping algorithms that can be done on a calculator.

·       Stanford Math Professor Brian Conrad notes “It’s entirely normal to need some repetition when learning mathematics” as a way of building deeper conceptual understanding and that “It is extremely dubious that an entire year could be shaved from the conventional 3-year curriculum by ‘eliminating redundancies’ (for all but the most talented math students)”.

·       Furthermore, pruning Algebra II often leads to the need for a compressed Algebra II/Precalculus course, which STEM professors have deemed “antithetical to responsible preparation”.

·       Lastly, Conrad notes that technology does not negate the need for students to learn math procedures. “If ‘correlation coefficient’ and ‘regression line’ are nothing more than buttons on a calculator or computer then the student is not learning mathematics.” Students have to understand the underlying math to know if the calculator is giving them a reasonable answer.

Data Science and Virginia

Virginia is increasing data science offerings for students, beginning with its new stand-alone high school data science course. However, are other changes coming in the upcoming Math SOL revision too? There are voices who still support the ideas of the defunct Virginia Math Pathways Initiative and are calling for them to be reflected in the revised SOLs. Given this, it is useful to review how VMPI handled data analysis.

VMPI proposed condensing Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II and new data analysis content into Grades 8-10 Essential Concepts courses. Oddly, however, students earned only two high school credits for this course sequence. This is strange because Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II currently generate a high school credit each. Thus, VMPI appeared to cut out a year’s worth of content from  Algebra I, Geometry, and/or Algebra II as it created the Essential Concepts courses which suggests it was using an aggressive “merge and purge” approach for incorporating data analysis content and pedagogical reforms. 

While course specifics were never released, most of the reduction in high-school credit likely came from Algebra II since i) VMPI did not want to increase the difficulty for students currently taking 8th grade Prealgebra and ii) VMPI stated that its Grades 8-10 courses would only cover material that was relevant for all students; students not planning to go to college would not need Algebra II. Some Algebra II content would likely have been compressed with Precalculus, similar to what San Francisco Unified School District did in its math reform.

One of the strongest voices advocating for incorporating VMPI’s ideas into the upcoming SOL revision is the Virginia Council for Mathematics Supervision (VCMS). They made the following recommendations regarding the 2023 SOL revision which parallels VMPI closely (emphasis added):

“Understanding, analyzing, and interpreting data must take a starring role in these standards. It will be essential to provide explicit connections to other disciplines, career, and life, thus the standards must include only enduring, essential, and relevant content. It will be important to evaluate each standard to determine if there is value in the standard for all children and if learning that content will provide a foundation for use that isn’t available through appropriate technology.”

This paragraph suggests that VCMS is advocating for a “merge and purge” strategy for the upcoming SOL revision whereby Algebra II content is pared back significantly to make way for data science. This view is supported by their call to exclude content that can be done with calculators and content that is not needed by non-college bound students.

Summary

As Virginia approaches its 2023 Math SOL review, we urge VDOE to listen to the 2,000+ STEM notables in the US and California who warn against undermining the integrity of the Algebra-Calculus pathway in the rush to emphasize data science.