Problem Solving and the New Curriculum
Stage: 1 and 2
Article by Lynne McClure
Published September 2013.
What's the point of doing maths?
I wonder what answers your class would give to this question. In a research project a few years ago I asked children of all ages what they thought maths was all about, and why they learned it at school. The answers were, in my view, depressing, and I would be prepared to hazard a guess that they would be much the same ten years on.
If you ask mathematicians what maths is, they will usually answer something along the lines of ‘the study of patterns’. Ask most children what they think maths is and they will say it’s all about rules which they need to learn, or facts they have to remember. Ask them why they learn maths and the most frequent answers include something about passing tests, or perhaps being better at handling money when shopping. Those answers arise because many children don't experience real mathematics in their classrooms – they get a proxy for it.
What children should be doing is solving problems, their own as well as those posed by others. Because the whole point of learning maths is to be able to solve problems. Learning those rules and facts is of course important, but they are the tools with which we learn to do maths fluently, they aren’t maths itself. It’s similar to the way that learning scales is an important part of learning to playing music fluently – but there’s far more to making music than playing scales.
So how does problem solving figure in the new National Curriculum which we are implementing in autumn 2014? The document says: