I am teaching a class in Arizona designed for seniors who have not passed our math test required for graduation: the AIMS. The AIMS only goes from Algebra 1 to Geometry, so any student who has reached senior year without passing it tends to be very weak in skills. Such students require slightly different approaches to curriculum. We’ve found from our studies at our school (and from partner schools) that two interventions in particular are by far the most helpful in boosting grades.

…but I had to figure out on my own: Some of the following missing facts are just particular quirks of my own education, and some are common across all mathematics education.

Obama’s education plan gives early education high priority; a good deal of input came from James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist famous for his studies of early childhood education.

Research shows that early experiences shape whether a child’s brain develops strong skills for future learning, behavior and success. Without a strong base on which to build, children, particularly disadvantaged children, will be behind long before they reach kindergarten.

-- From Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Plan for Lifetime Success Through Education 

This is the first in a series of posts analyzing the Obama education plan as laid out on the official Web site. While this analysis (and choice of selections) is done with an eye towards mathematics, it applies to the entire span of education. 

On April 25th, Nature published an article titled LEARNING THEORY: The Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math that swarmed across the Internet with the essential claim that abstract examples were more useful to learning than concrete examples.

Mathematicians sometimes cringe at discussion of real-world problems, and write rants decrying the state of mathematics education.