Improving Missouri’s math skills

For the past five years, fewer than one in five high school students in Missouri, on average, have scored “proficient” or higher on the math portion of the Missouri Assessment Program test. Missouri’s mediocrity is not atypical of the United States, which as a whole lags the rest of the developed world in terms of students’ math ability.

MU math professor Elias Saab believes part of the solution to these problems might be his Web site, mathonline.missouri.edu.

In the last year, more than 1.3 million users have logged on to his site, where students can create their own math tests covering everything from algebra to trigonometry and calculus.

Online math tests aren’t new. But what makes Saab’s site unique is the flexibility of tests: The questions change while still stressing certain user-defined skills. And that helps students learn, Saab said.

For example, a student might want to brush up on the geometry of triangles. When he logs on to Saab’s site, he would choose his topic, the number and difficulty of the questions he wanted to practice. A sample question might ask for the lengths of a right triangle with known measurements of three and four. If the student gets the question wrong, he will see the method he should have used to calculate the answer.

Saab’s site separates itself from other online math tests when the student reloads the test. The values change. The same question is asked about the measurements of a right triangle. Except the second time, it has measurements of three and six. The values will keep changing as long as the student wants to continue practicing.

By generating new values and offering methodology after each test is submitted, Saab’s site makes sure students learn the concepts behind the math instead of just memorization, he said.

“My site will turn any web browser into a teaching site,” Saab said. “It’s a learning tool.”

When it comes to math, there are a lot of explanations for why students don’t do well, said Chip Sharp, who coordinates high school math education for Columbia Public Schools. Part of the problem is the textbook companies, which make books that cover far more territory than a class can cover in one year. Another problem is the lack of a national curriculum, which means students from one state to another or even from different districts in the same city don’t learn the same concepts.

The result has been a curriculum that’s “a mile wide and an inch deep,” Sharp said.

Sharp admits he hasn’t looked at Saab’s site recently. But he said mathonline.missouri.edu and the myriad other math Web sites can be valuable teaching tools to help combat the problem of low math achievement by high school students. However, the United State’s long-term problems with math proficiency won’t be solved on the Internet.

“There’s a tendency for those sites to not really build understanding,” Sharp said. “But if this one does, well that’s a whole different level.”

Sharp said the district doesn’t currently endorse Saab’s site, but he hopes students are taking advantage of it and other sites that promote math.

And so, for that matter, does Saab.

“Students in rural areas who do not have specialized teachers to teach all mathematics courses can profit from our online testing facilities and use them as a self-teaching tool,” Saab said.