[ Times Colonist ] Many Canadian provinces adopted discovery-based curriculums about 15 years ago. Newer curricula and textbooks appeared, advocating the use of multiple strategies in the classroom, replacing more conventional methods for teaching arithmetic. The result of this phenomenon has led to a remarkable decline in math skills, and a proliferation of children enrolled in costly learning centres to achieve knowledge of foundational math facts.
These centres and private tutors use more conventional and traditional methods to teach their students, because they have been proven to work. This is something to which our policy-makers must pay attention.
Gee, it didn't work! Project Follow Through came out in the early 1970's--that's fully 40 years ago, which means pretty much every single teacher currently trained and working has been trained after its findings were known...and utterly ignored.
The world has known what works and what doesn't in math education for four decades. Educrats continue to ignore it.
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