Arm has become a founding supporter of a research project by The Royal Society to investigate the future of the schools mathematics curriculum, it was announced last week. Arm’s involvement has been driven by the Arm School Program (ASP), as part of series of initiatives focused on closing the STEM skills gap. Read the Royal Society's press release here.
The Royal Society is working in partnership with The Royal Statistical Society, the London Mathematical Society and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, in a two-year project led by Professor Frank Kelly FRS, to understand the nature of mathematical skills young people need to be successful in their education, future employment and life.
Professor Frank Kelly, Chair of The Royal Society’s Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME) recently commented:
“Mathematics has been taught since the ancient times, and underpins our modern technology, economy and society. We need to ensure our education system provides all young people across all stages of education with mathematical knowledge and skills, which will require curriculum and qualifications change over the next ten years. It will need not only a healthy supply of maths teachers, but also best-in-class teacher training and professional development and innovative curricula which are evidence-based about what works. “We are delighted that Arm is the first partner to support the research phase of this very important project. In a world where mathematics is increasingly embedded into our work and daily lives we need to ensure that the mathematics curriculum equips young people with competencies that will be appropriate and relevant for uncertain future workplace practices.”
“Mathematics has been taught since the ancient times, and underpins our modern technology, economy and society. We need to ensure our education system provides all young people across all stages of education with mathematical knowledge and skills, which will require curriculum and qualifications change over the next ten years. It will need not only a healthy supply of maths teachers, but also best-in-class teacher training and professional development and innovative curricula which are evidence-based about what works.
“We are delighted that Arm is the first partner to support the research phase of this very important project. In a world where mathematics is increasingly embedded into our work and daily lives we need to ensure that the mathematics curriculum equips young people with competencies that will be appropriate and relevant for uncertain future workplace practices.”
The Mathematics Curricula Futures programme of work will establish the mathematical, quantitative and data knowledge and skills needed by business, industry, the third sector, government and higher education. It will also review the mathematics curricula, qualifications and assessment and propose future curricular models suitable for the 21st-century young person.
“The STEM skills gap is an ongoing concern for companies focused on technological innovation, and we’re working closely with the wider education community to address this gap through the Arm School Program (ASP), which focuses on supporting children’s experiences of STEM in the classroom,” said Graham Budd, president and chief operating officer at Arm. “Mathematics is very much at the heart of STEM and we hope The Royal Society’s research will lead to students being well equipped with the skills needed to be successful in future careers in technology.”
The widening STEM skills gap – the difference between the skills required by industry and those developed by work-ready graduates – is a strategic issue for Arm and our partner ecosystem, affecting both future innovation and long-term growth. The most efficient mechanism for delivering positive educational impact, both equitably and at scale, is through engaging with national and regional school systems. As part of Arm Education, ASP works with its partners – drawn from across industry and the education sector – as part of a federated response to support schools, teachers and policy-makers to give all learners the opportunity to develop the skills and knowledge needed for a lifetime of engagement in STEM.
One of the difficulties in discussing STEM is that there is no single definition. Colucci-Gray at al. (p.26, 2016) remark that STEM as an educational policy construct “does not map directly onto the practices of schools, which remain committed to the individual disciplinary perspectives, nor does it map onto assessment frameworks”*. It is true that in most education systems ‘STEM’ is not taught as a single subject in the school curriculum. Instead, as remarked, the constituent disciplines are typically taught and assessed separately, although in subjects such as Design & Technology – arguably the closest match in the English curriculum to the ‘E’ in STEM – students are required to apply knowledge and skills drawn from across multiple disciplines in project work. A curriculum may also present opportunities for cross-curricular working, such as the study of themes that run across lessons in sciences and mathematics. The extent to which this manifests itself in the classroom typically depends on things like teacher training and the extent of cross-departmental collaboration in a school.
STEM may also be addressed informally, such as in voluntary lunchtime or after-school clubs. Because clubs vary enormously in the way they are run, the evidence around their educational impact is also various. For many learners, they are an important motivating feature of the school experience. However, such activities are frequently self-selecting, reinforcing the divide between learners who already identify strongly with STEM (commonly due the home environment) and those who do not (encapsulated in the concept of ‘science capital’).
But the skills and knowledge that comprise common definitions of STEM are typically not well-represented in the formal, assessable parts of school curricula.
Alongside literacy, mathematics is one of the two subjects that runs through compulsory education in countries worldwide. Mathematical skills and knowledge are embedded in sciences, technology, engineering and computing. This makes schools mathematics a powerful vehicle for change in STEM, and that’s why the Arm School Program is engaging with some key initiatives in this space.
The Arm School Program’s strategy is underpinned by two pillars: Community and Research and Content and Training.
You can read more about our approach to Content and Training in Rob Leeman’s recent blog on project-based learning.
Community and Research is about the Arm School Program supporting both teacher communities of practice (read about our work with Computing At School in this blog) and helping to plug gaps in the evidence-base around what constitutes effective practice in schools education. That evidence-base is developed through different types of educational research. This might include assessing the efficacy of a particular intervention: gathering data in order to take a view on the statistical significance of any measurable impact (if you run a Code Club, you might be interested to read this piece of qualitative research). Research might also include building on existing evidence to theorise a new approach to teaching, or a new theory of learning, which itself could be tested empirically in subsequent studies.
Supporting educational research is important, because effective education policies are built on evidence. This is sometimes wrongly interpreted to imply that education systems cannot innovate. Instead, it is a common-sense approach, asking that, where interventions are developed, they learn from past successes and failures, and there is a level of objectivity in assessing their impact. This is why, since it began in 2018, the Arm School Program has been committed to supporting educational research into STEM. For example, earlier this year we worked with Cambridge Maths, part of the University of Cambridge, on a short project to explore mapping computational thinking. This was motivated by the question of whether GCSE and A-level Computing could be made more accessible by changing the mathematics taught earlier in the curriculum. ASP is holding an event on this project at Cambridge Assessment in July – keep an eye on the Education Hub for more information.
The Royal Society continues to produce reports that contextualise research within the educational policy landscape, and which have proved effective in influencing government policy. A good example is their 2017 report on the state of Computing education in the UK, which led to the establishment of the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) – an initiative led by a consortium that includes the Raspberry Pi Foundation. You can read about how Arm, through the Arm School Program, became a founding sponsor of the NCCE.
One of the recurring debates in school mathematics is around the extent to which it should adapt according to changes in the use of technology and changes in the workplace. Proponents of radical change argue that much of school mathematics remains, in essence, unchanged since the schooling of the 19th century, with little acknowledgment of computerisation. What’s the point, the argument might go, of children spending years studying arithmetic repetitiously, when they can just pop the question into a search engine and get an answer immediately? Isn’t this, after all, the sort of thing we all do in real, everyday life?
It’s true, most of us would struggle to remember the last time we got out a piece of paper and a pair of scissors to create a visual representation of a multiplication sum in order to work out the answer. It’s also true that, for many of us, mental arithmetic has been outsourced to our mobile devices.
However, this reductive argument ignores the evidence base around the importance of children developing strong conceptual understanding and the mechanisms for doing this effectively. In essence, if a learner doesn’t develop a clear understanding of what it means when they add or multiply two numbers together, then so much of what follows – arguably, across all STEM disciplines – is at worst inaccessible or at best built on weak foundations. Without that solid foundational understanding, the argument goes, the opportunity for a learner to develop as creative problem-solver in mathematics, computing or engineering – a piece of the STEM skills gap puzzle – narrows significantly.
Ah, but the original argument would expand, in the real world you don’t need to understand how numbers work, you just need to know how to use the toolset that’s available to you. Whatever machine you’re using – Google or Wolfram Alpha – you just need to know what numbers to input and what the subsequent output means. The platform ‘blackboxes’ the maths anyway, so what’s the point in learning about it?
Yes but, the counterargument would continue, that’s all very well if we’re happy to develop passive users of applications, but who makes the blackbox? And who says it’s working? What if you enter an input incorrectly – how will you recognise that the answer may be wrong?
Of course, the reality is that it isn’t a dichotomous issue. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that it’s possible to develop a curriculum that both enables learners to develop strong foundations in mathematics while also being adapted to the modern world. And that’s another reason why The Royal Society’s new project is so timely. Its recent report on the need to develop the provision of Data Science in the curriculum (77% of Big Data role in the UK are difficult to fill), pointed to the requirement for curriculum change and greater teacher support, with the NCCE and the mathematics community as lead stakeholders.
Developing the evidence base to respond to these debates is fundamental to progressing STEM education in schools and closing the STEM skills gap. That’s why the Arm School Program is supporting The Royal Society and its stakeholders as it embarks on this important project, and we look forward to sharing insights with you on the Education Hub as it develops.
*Colucci-Gray, L., Trowsdale, J., Cooke, C. F., Davies, R., Burnard, P., & Gray, D. S. (2017). Reviewing the potential and challenges of developing STEAM education through creative pedagogies for 21st century learning: how can school curricula be broadened towards a more responsive, dynamic, and inclusive form of education? British Educational Research Association, London.
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