The Science of Making Math Stick: Using Brain Research to Combat the NAEP Score Crisis

Transcript

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 188: The Science of Making Math Stick: Using Brain Research to Combat the NAEP Score Crisis

In this episode I had planned to share previews from our upcoming Virtual Math Summit but then the 2024 NAEP math scores got released and I saw how some of the sessions relate to scores.  If you haven’t registered for the FREE summit you can do that at VirtualMathSummit.com to get 10 days to watch all the sessions.  If you’ve already registered, but you are thinking you’d like more than 10 days to watch, go to VirtualMathSummit.com/upgrade to see your options for extended access.

Alright, let’s talk about something that’s critical for every math educator – helping our students retain what they learn. This is timely given the latest NAEP results.  I am not one who thinks standardized tests should be the end all be all, however I do think we need to pay attention to them and use the results for reflection and planning.

The 2024 Nation’s Report Card, which is the report of the NAEP scores, came out recently and it shows some mixed results in mathematics. There’s a bit of good news – fourth grade math scores improved by 3 points compared to 2022, but what news stories I’ve seen are NOT reporting is that only 39% of 4th grade students are performing at or above the Proficient level. 

Eighth grade math scores gained 2 points compared to 2022, but that wasn’t enough to overcome the 8-point drop that happened in 2022. Only about 28% of eighth graders are performing at or above the Proficient level, and nearly 40% are working below the Basic level.

If you look even further back, we are now 4 years after the pandemic and we’re still below our 2019 scores. I know I don’t have to tell you because so many of you feel it…you feel like you are constantly trying to play ‘catch-up’ in helping your students fill those gaps in learning.

Today I want to share some powerful insights from two of our upcoming Virtual Math Summit presenters who offer research-backed strategies for helping students truly retain mathematical learning. Michaela Epstein and Jen Hunt both dive deep into how students learn and retain mathematical concepts, and their research-based approaches could help us address some of these concerning trends we’re seeing in the NAEP data. I’ve been spending my time grabbing clips from summit sessions in the hopes that sharing them might give you just one new idea even if you don’t actually attend the summit.  

Let’s start by understanding why students forget. Jen Hunt explains in her session that our working memory has significant limitations:

“Topic 3: Working Memory.  Get your hand out and tap your forehead, five fingers if you’re able. Bop, Bop, Bop, Bop, Bop. Think of those as little Post-it notes, sitting here in your working memory. Working memory is that temporary place where information can be held. Math Guru, and my math spirit animal, Liesl McConchie says that our working memory has about five post-it notes. And we can hold on to those not very long. I mean no longer than 5 minutes, so you’re not holding onto that information very long, 30 seconds to a few minutes like maybe. And so those five, I call them really fragile, they’re really fragile that working memory and you could only hold about five pieces of information. Well there’s a lot of things in math that require functional working memory and that’s one of the reasons that learning isn’t sticking, because math is requiring it but that doesn’t necessarily mean that our students have a lot of functionality in their working memory here’s why…”

When presented with too much information at once, students simply can’t hold onto it all. And 5 sticky notes are our typical students, our neurodivergent learners it’s around 2 or 3 sticky notes that they have to hold information.  So many of our students are experiencing cognitive overload causing them to not be able to retain information.  In both Jen & Michaela’s sessions they give tips on how to help with this.

One key factor in retention, and reducing the overload, is timing. Both Jen and Michaela Epstein talk about the forgetting curve.  Here’s Michaela explaining it:

“So we’ve got a disparity happening in how we ideally practice versus what we do in reality and I want to share a couple of graphs with you that start to dig up why the ideal might look different.  So this is a graph that comes from a researcher by the name of Hermann Ebbinghaus and maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s commonly known as The Forgetting Curve. There are a couple of things that are fascinating about this particular graph. Firstly the data collected by Ebbinghaus was in the late 1800s yet this is a graph that is still shared and relevant today and that’s because it’s been replicated over time. So let me just break down what we’ve got going on in this graph. Along the x-axis going along the bottom is the number of days since the learning happened. So it starts from zero and then you get towards you know over a month. And on the y-axis going up, we’ve got the percentage of information retained.  Of what was learned, how much is then remembered. And what you can see in this graph is there is a very sharp decline even within the first hour.  A huge chunk of information is quickly forgotten. And I think this is a really interesting one in terms of considering well what parallels there might be for our students in maths and especially when they’re going through their day and learning a huge amount not just in maths but across all different subjects.”

If you are just listening to the audio of this episode, what you can’t see is that graph shows that students forget around 70% of what they’ve learned within the first 24 hours!  We’ve all had those times where we cram for a test and we can retain that information for the test and those study sessions work for short term but as we will hear Michaela say later, information can be “learned quickly but not very securely.”

This research about The Forgetting Curve really highlights why we need to be intentional about how we structure our math instruction. We can combat these challenges with the right strategies and both presenters share research-backed strategies that can help reverse this trend.

One of the most powerful findings they discuss is called dual coding theory. Research shows that when we combine visual and verbal information, ALL students retain information better – not just our visual learners. This isn’t about learning styles – it’s about how the human brain processes and stores information. Given that 40% of our 8th graders are working below Basic level in math, we need to be intentional about making mathematical concepts visual for all our learners. 

Another powerful way to increase retention is through engagement. Here’s Jen Hunt explaining the science behind why one of my own personal favorite math activities can be so powerful:

“#5: Dopamine. So dopamine as you remember is the neurotransmitter associated with motivation and reward. Dopamine does a lot of things in our bodies but one of the things that it does is actually strengthens learning and memory. How fantastic is that?! So activities where we can increase dopamine, or cause dopamine to happen, for students are actually really beneficial to their learning. Guess what does release dopamine? It’s math games. Math games release a lot of dopamine for kids and I highly encourage math games. Not just because they’re engaging. Not just because they make kids feel empowered in their own learning. Not just because they teach those soft skills of them taking turns, sharing, of winning gracefully, losing gracefully. Not just because they teach kids how to manage supplies and teach kids how to manage themselves. But also because there’s a lot going on with dopamine. It actually helps them learn it in different way and remember it better because they’re not being asked to do something that might feels too hard for them. It might be too hard for them but they don’t seem to care as much when they play a game. so I’ve watched students be really effective in their math learning just because they’re playing a math game and it’s really worth their time. Kids play to learn. Of all ages. 5th & 6th graders play to learn, too. So if we can get them to play we are actually getting them to do the work of math while they’re doing a game.”

I absolutely love math games as a way to have students practice math concepts. And speaking of practice, how we space it out matters tremendously. There is research around doing mass practice versus spaced practice. Here’s Michaela again:

“So in this graph, again we’ve got the number of days going along the x-axis and the percentage of information retained going on the Y. But this time what’s happened is, on a regular basis that initial information has been reviewed and every time that review has happened the memory of it, the memory of that learning, has gone back up to the top again okay.  So what we are seeing here is that by revisiting old content that memory gets stronger.  Now Roediger and Pye did some research in 2012 and they explained if information is repeated back to back, so in that massed fashion, you know 20 questions all at once sort of thing, it’s often learned quickly but not very securely. So that forgetting happens.  But if information is repeated in this distributed pattern-like we can see in this graph it’s learned more slowly but it’s retained for much longer.  Now interestingly, this graph is very important because it’s not just happened in one context. In fact, Donlosky and colleagues in 2013, they reviewed contemporary research in this area and they found that this idea of the spaced practice has a large effect across a range of students, ages, topics, and forms of assessment. So actually this is a very robust finding and even like the effects get stronger when you start to increase the spacing between the reviews over time. So again I invite you to just have a think about what that might mean for your students in maths and how this research finding could be used to help your students.” 

These research-based insights give us clear direction for how we can help our students retain mathematical learning better. Let’s talk about three practical strategies you can start using tomorrow.

First, space out practice instead of massing it all together. Instead of doing all practice problems at once, spread them out over time so that you can revisit concepts. Michaela & Jen suggest incorporating quick reviews of previous content into your daily routines. This might look like starting each lesson with a quick number string that connects to previous learning.

Second, make mathematical concepts both visual and verbal. Kids need the visuals of the mathematical concepts. When students can see a concept AND talk about it, they’re more likely to remember it. Given the NAEP results showing widening gaps between high and low performers, this strategy could be particularly helpful for our struggling learners.  It is important for all learners but I want to highlight that often with our struggling learners we think we need to hurry to catch them up so we want to jump straight to teachers explaining the formal algorithms instead of letting kids explore…but slow down, help them build that foundation of understanding that isn’t there for them.  One of my mantras I like to encourage teachers to use is “slow down to speed up.” 

Third, support turning working memory into long-term memory ensuring you take 1-2 minutes at the very least to revisit the main idea from the lesson.  I didn’t share a clip of that but Jen makes such a great case for this in her session.  After an hour, the Forgetting Curve has dipped drastically, so at the end of the lesson make sure to revisit the main ideas with your students.

Looking at the 2024 NAEP results, it’s clear we need to make some shifts. The fact that nearly 40% of our 8th graders are working below Basic level suggests that many students aren’t retaining fundamental concepts. By understanding how the brain learns and retains information, we can make intentional shifts in our instruction that will help students truly learn and remember mathematics.

If you’re interested in learning more get registered for the FREE Virtual Math Summit to watch the full sessions by both Jen Hunt and Michaela Epstein. Jen’s session dives deep into how the brain learns mathematics, while Michaela’s session focuses specifically on helping students retain what they learn. Register at VirtualMathSummit.com. Michaela’s session is on Saturday, February 22nd and Jen’s session is Sunday, February 23rd but if you can’t be there when sessions get released, everyone who is registered has through March 3rd to watch the replays.

Until next week, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, keep letting your students explore math, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep Building Math Minds.