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America’s kids are terrible at math coming out of the pandemic as Harvard professor warns of ‘a generation’s worth of progress lost’

On a breezy July morning in South Seattle, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind an elementary school.

One by one, they raced to a table, where they scribbled answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer program run by the nonprofit School Connect WA, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills lost during the pandemic . There are 25 students in the program, and all of them are one to three grades behind.

One 11-year-old boy couldn’t do two-digit subtraction. Thanks to the program and his mother, who has helped him each night, he’s caught up. Now, he says math is challenging, but he likes it.

Other kids haven’t fared so well.

Across the country, schools are scrambling to catch up students in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of missing skills. On average, students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education analysts.

Children lost ground on reading tests , too, but the math declines were particularly striking. Experts say virtual learning complicated math instruction, making it tricky for teachers to guide students over a screen or spot weaknesses in problem-solving skills. Plus, parents were more likely to read with their children at home than practice math.

The result: Students’ math skills plummeted across the board, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in math performance. And students aren’t bouncing back as quickly as educators hoped, supercharging worries about how they will fare in high school and whether science, tech and medical fields will be available to them.

The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

Students had been making incremental progress on national math tests since 1990. But over the past year, fourth and eighth grade math scores slipped to the lowest levels in about 20 years , according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card.”

“It’s a generation’s worth of progress lost,” said Andrew Ho, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

At Moultrie Middle School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Jennifer Matthews has seen the pandemic fallout in her eighth grade classes. Her students have shown indifference to understanding her pre-algebra and Algebra I lessons.

“They don’t allow themselves to process the material. They don’t allow themselves to think, ‘This might take a day to understand or learn,’” she said.

And recently students have been coming to her classes with gaps in their understanding of math concepts. Basic fractions, for instance, continue to stump many of them, she said.

Using federal pandemic relief money, some schools have added tutors or piloted new curriculum approaches in the name of academic recovery. But that money has a looming expiration date: The September 2024 deadline for allocating funds will arrive before many children have caught up.

Like other districts across the country, Jefferson County Schools in Birmingham, Alabama, saw students’ math skills take a nosedive from 2019 to 2021. Leveraging pandemic aid, the district placed math coaches in all of their middle schools.

The coaches help teachers learn new and better ways to teach students. About 1 in 5 public schools in the United States have a math coach, according to federal data . The efforts appear to be paying off: State testing shows math scores have started to inch back up for most of the Jefferson County middle schools.

In Pittsburgh’s school system, which serves a student population that is 53% African American, special education teacher Ebonie Lamb said it’s “emotionally exhausting” to see the inequities between student groups. But she believes those academic gaps can be closed through culturally relevant lessons, and targeting teaching to each student’s skill level.

Lamb said she typically asks students to do a “walk a mile in my shoes” project in which they design shoes and describe their lives. It’s a way she can learn more about them as individuals. Ultimately, those connections help on the academic front. Last year, she and a co-teacher taught math in a small group format that allowed students to master skills at their own pace.

“All students in the class cannot follow the same, scripted curriculum and be on the same problem all the time,” she said.

Adding to the challenge of catching kids up is debate over how math should be taught. Over the years, experts say, the pendulum has swung between procedural learning, such as teaching kids to memorize how to solve problems step-by-step, and conceptual understanding, in which students grasp underlying math relationships.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. … For so many adults, math was taught just as memorization,” said Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “When people start to understand what’s going on, in whatever you’re learning but especially in math, you develop a new appreciation for it.”

Teaching math should not be an either-or situation, said Sarah Powell, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who researches math instruction. A shift too far in the conceptual direction, she said, risks alienating students who haven’t mastered the foundational skills.

“We actually do have to teach, and it is less sexy and it’s not as interesting,” she said.

In Spring, Texas, parent Aggie Gambino has often found herself searching YouTube for math videos. Giada, one of her twin 10-year-old daughters, has dyslexia and also struggles with math, especially word problems. Gambino says helping her daughter has proved challenging, given instructional approaches that differ from the way she was taught.

She wishes her daughter’s school would send home information on how students are being taught.

“The more parents understand how they’re being taught,” she said, “the better participant they can be in their child’s learning.”

Even at a nationally recognized magnet school, the lingering impact of the pandemic on students’ math skills is apparent. At the Townview School of Science and Engineering in Dallas, the incoming ninth graders in Lance Barasch’s summer camp course needed to relearn the meaning of words like “term” and “coefficient.”

“Then you can go back to what you’re really trying to teach,” he said.

Barasch wasn’t surprised that the teens were missing some skills after their chaotic middle school years.

The hope is that by taking a step back, students can begin to move forward.

Claire Bryan of The Seattle Times, Trisha Powell Crain of AL.com, Maura Turcotte of The Post and Courier, and Talia Richman of The Dallas Morning News contributed to this report.

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic

U.S. colleges are searching for solutions as they see alarming numbers of students arrive with gaps in their math skills

FAIRFAX, Va. -- Diego Fonseca looked at the computer and took a breath. It was his final attempt at the math placement test for his first year of college. His first three tries put him in pre-calculus, a blow for a student who aced honors physics and computer science in high school.

Functions and trigonometry came easily, but the basics gave him trouble. He struggled to understand algebra, a subject he studied only during a year of remote learning in high school.

“I didn’t have a hands-on, in-person class, and the information wasn’t really there,” said Fonseca, 19, of Ashburn, Virginia, a computer science major who hoped to get into calculus. “I really struggled when it came to higher-level algebra because I just didn’t know anything.”

Fonseca is among 100 students who opted to spend a week of summer break at George Mason University brushing up on math lessons that didn’t stick during pandemic schooling. The northern Virginia school started Math Boot Camp because of alarming numbers of students arriving with gaps in their math skills.

Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.

Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.

At George Mason, fewer students are getting into calculus — the first college-level course for some majors — and more are failing. Students who fall behind often disengage, disappearing from class.

“This is a huge issue,” said Maria Emelianenko, chair of George Mason’s math department. “We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third.”

For Jessica Babcock, a Temple University math professor, the magnitude of the problem hit home last year as she graded quizzes in her intermediate algebra class, the lowest option for STEM majors. The quiz, a softball at the start of the fall semester, asked students to subtract eight from negative six.

“I graded a whole bunch of papers in a row. No two papers had the same answer, and none of them were correct,” she said. “It was a striking moment of, like, wow — this is significant and deep.”

Before the pandemic, about 800 students per semester were placed into that class, the equivalent of ninth grade math. By 2021, it swelled to nearly 1,400.

“It’s not just that they’re unprepared, they’re almost damaged,” said Brian Rider, Temple's math chair. “I hate to use that term, but they’re so behind.”

Researchers say math learning suffered for various reasons. An intensely hands-on subject, math was hard to translate to virtual classrooms. When students fell behind in areas like algebra, gaps could go unnoticed for a year or more as they moved to subjects such as geometry or trigonometry. And at home, parents are generally more comfortable helping with reading than math.

As with other learning setbacks, math issues are most pronounced among Black, Latino, low-income and other vulnerable students, said Katharine Strunk, who led a study on learning delays in Michigan and is now dean of the graduate school of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Those are the students who were most impacted by the pandemic, and they’re the ones who are going to suffer the longer-term consequences,” she said. “They’re not going to have the same access.”

Colleges say there’s no quick fix. Many are trying to identify gaps sooner, adopting placement tests that delve deeper into math skills. Some are adding summer camps like George Mason’s, which helped participants increase placement test scores by 59% on average.

In lieu of traditional remedial classes, which some research finds to be ineffective, more schools are offering “corequisite” classes that help students shore up on the basics while also taking higher courses like calculus.

Penn State tackled the problem by expanding peer tutoring. Professors report that students who participate have scored 20% higher on exams, said Tracy Langkilde, dean of Penn State's College of Science.

What's becoming a persistent problem at some colleges has been a blip for others. At Iowa State University, known for its engineering program, students entering in 2020 were far more likely to be placed in lower-level math classes, and grades fell. That group of students has had continued trouble, but numbers improved for the following year's class, said Eric Weber, math department chair.

At Temple, there's been no rebound. Professors tried small changes: expanded office hours, a new tutoring center, pared-down lessons focused on the essentials.

But students didn’t come for help, and they kept getting D's and F's. This year, Babcock is redesigning the algebra course. Instead of a traditional lecture, it'll focus on active learning, an approach that demands more participation and expands students' role in the learning process. Class will be more of a group discussion, with lots of problems worked in-class.

“We really want students to feel like they’re part of their learning,” Babcock said. “We can’t change their preparation coming in, but we can work to meet their needs in the best way possible.”

George Mason also is emphasizing active learning. Its new placement test helps students find gaps and fill them in before taking it again, with up to four attempts. During the school year, students struggling in math can switch to slower-paced versions that take two terms instead of one.

At math camp, Fonseca felt he was making up ground. He studied hard, doing practice problems on the train ride to camp. But when he got to the placement test's algebra portion, he made the same mistakes. His final score again placed him in pre-calculus.

The setback would have meant spending at least one extra semester catching up on math at George Mason. In the end, Fonseca decided to start at Northern Virginia Community College. After two years, he plans to transfer to one of Virginia's public four-year universities.

A couple weeks after camp, Fonseca again found himself taking a placement test, this time for the community college.

“I managed to use the knowledge of the boot camp, and I got into calculus," he said. “I didn't have any expectation I'd do that.”

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic

George Mason Term Instructor Ermias Kassaye, left, helps a student figure out an equation during a summer math boot camp on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. Researchers say math learning suffered during the pandemic for various reasons. An intensely hands-on subject, math was hard to translate to virtual classrooms. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

George Mason Term Instructor Ermias Kassaye, standing left, leads a summer math boot camp on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. Dozens opted to spend a week of summer break at the university brushing up on math lessons that didn’t stick during pandemic schooling. The northern Virginia school started Math Boot Camp because of alarming numbers of students arriving with gaps in their math skills. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

A student uses his phone to copy the whiteboard at the end of a summer math boot camp session on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

Students uses their bodies to plot their location on a graph based on the number they are holding during a summer math boot camp session on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. Researchers say math learning suffered during the pandemic for various reasons. An intensely hands-on subject, math was hard to translate to virtual classrooms. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

Diego Fonseca, left, and his fellow students uses their bodies to plot their location on a graph based on the number they are holding during a summer math boot camp session on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. “I managed to use the knowledge of the boot camp, and I got into calculus,” Fonseca says. “I didn’t have any expectation I’d do that.” (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

Students take part in a summer math boot camp on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

George Mason undergraduate math major David Wigginton writes an equation on a whiteboard as students Ethan Hill, right, and Diego Fonseca, center, take part in a summer math boot camp on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

Rosa Sarmiento, second from left, and Alicia Davis, center, work together to solve the math equation written on a whiteboard during a summer math boot camp session on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

George Mason Term grad student Aman D’Souza, right, calls on Alicia Davis, second from left, during summer math boot camp on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

A student takes a break next to a whiteboard during a summer math boot camp on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2023 at George Mason University in Fairfax. Va. The pandemic disrupted all learning but caused an outsize impact in math. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)

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FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — Diego Fonseca looked at the computer and took a breath. It was his final attempt at the math placement test for his first year of college. His first three tries put him in pre-calculus, a blow for a student who aced honors physics and computer science in high school.

Functions and trigonometry came easily, but the basics gave him trouble . He struggled to understand algebra, a subject he studied only during a year of remote learning in high school.

Giada Gambino, 10, left, becomes frustrated with a problem on a math worksheet from school as her mother helps her work through it at the dining room table in their home Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Spring, Texas. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)

Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further , by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.

Before the pandemic, about 800 students per semester were placed into that class, the equivalent of ninth grade math. By 2021, it swelled to nearly 1,400.

“It’s not just that they’re unprepared, they’re almost damaged,” said Brian Rider, Temple’s math chair. “I hate to use that term, but they’re so behind.”

Researchers say math learning suffered for various reasons. An intensely hands-on subject, math was hard to translate to virtual classrooms . When students fell behind in areas like algebra, gaps could go unnoticed for a year or more as they moved to subjects such as geometry or trigonometry. And at home, parents are generally more comfortable helping with reading than math.

What’s becoming a persistent problem at some colleges has been a blip for others. At Iowa State University, known for its engineering program, students entering in 2020 were far more likely to be placed in lower-level math classes, and grades fell. That group of students has had continued trouble, but numbers improved for the following year’s class, said Eric Weber, math department chair.

At Temple, there’s been no rebound. Professors tried small changes: expanded office hours, a new tutoring center, pared-down lessons focused on the essentials.

But students didn’t come for help, and they kept getting D’s and F’s. This year, Babcock is redesigning the algebra course. Instead of a traditional lecture, it’ll focus on active learning, an approach that demands more participation and expands students’ role in the learning process. Class will be more of a group discussion, with lots of problems worked in-class.

At math camp, Fonseca felt he was making up ground. He studied hard, doing practice problems on the train ride to camp. But when he got to the placement test’s algebra portion, he made the same mistakes. His final score again placed him in pre-calculus.

A couple weeks after camp, Fonseca again found himself taking a placement test, this time for the community college.

“I managed to use the knowledge of the boot camp, and I got into calculus,” he said. “I didn’t have any expectation I’d do that.”

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Articles on Mathematics

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Teachers and too much homework contribute to maths anxiety – study

Level of maths anxiety within same school or classroom found to predict individuals’ maths achievement

If the thought of fractions or differential equations makes you break you out in a cold sweat, you are not alone. Maths anxiety – a negative emotional reaction to mathematics – is a global phenomenon, hampering maths achievement regardless of where people live, research has found.

It’s not only a child’s own maths anxiety that affects their performance but that of their peers: the largest and most culturally diverse study to date shows that in about half of countries, including England, the average level of maths anxiety within the same school or classroom predicts individual students’ maths achievement, independently of their own anxiety levels.

“Having found that the emotional state of one’s peer group may have an effect on children’s maths achievement, it is important for teachers, parents and policymakers to not only be mindful of a child’s own ability or emotional state, but the context in which they’re studying,” said Dr Nathan Lau, of the University of Western Ontario, who led the research.

Many people experience some degree of discomfort when confronted with a mathematical problem, ranging from mild tension to intense dread. Some people also experience physical symptoms such as a racing heart, sweating or feeling sick. Besides avoiding everyday situations involving numbers, people with such feelings may hold back from applying for promotions or pursuing careers in related subjects such as science, technology or engineering.

To better understand the contextual factors underpinning maths anxiety, Lau and colleagues analysed data from 1,175,515 students who participated in three large international studies of achievement. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , found that students in countries with higher levels of maths anxiety tend to achieve lower maths grades.

The strongest predictor of maths anxiety was how competent students perceived their maths teacher to be: those with less confidence in their teacher tended to feel more anxious. Being set large amounts of maths homework, and parental involvement in homework, also contributed to anxiety to a lesser degree.

In about half of countries, it wasn’t only the child’s own level of maths anxiety that predicted their achievement but that of their peers. One factor appeared to be the cultural acceptance of uncertain situations.

“It seems like the more rigid or less accepting of uncertainty [a culture is], the lower this peer group effect is,” Lau said. “We can’t really say if there’s a causal relationship, but one hypothesis is that teachers have a more organised way of teaching their materials [in such countries]. Possibly, children with maths anxiety prefer there to be fewer surprises, such as being called on to stand up and work out a question on a blackboard.”

Prof Margaret Brown, the president of the Maths Anxiety Trust, said: “It shows for the first time that maths anxiety is not just an individual phenomenon which affects maths attainment, but it also strongly correlates with other contextual factors like the pupils’ confidence in their teacher, teachers’ own confidence in their maths, and the amount of homework and parental involvement in completing it.

“It is also significant that maths anxiety varies across different countries. England’s results suggest that our secondary students are among the most seriously affected by maths anxiety, and that the effect of factors from both the school and home environment are particularly strong in England. This provides strong evidence that maths attainment in England could be improved by changing our mathematics curriculum, teaching styles and our examination system so that they cause less stress on students, teachers and parents.”

Prof Denes Szucs, the deputy director of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Neuroscience in Education, said: “This study confirms some of the things we already knew about maths anxiety, but using a giant sample.” His team recently interviewed 1,700 UK schoolchildren and found that a perception of maths being more difficult than other subjects often contributed to the problem. Teachers also played a role, with anxious children often reporting being confused by different teaching methods.

“The big question is what to do about it,” Szucs said. On an individual level, he recommended trying to disentangle feelings of anxiety from ability. “Our UK research showed that most children who are maths anxious are not actually low achievers, they just feel anxious about maths. Possibly they picked it up from their family or school, but it is not necessarily a justified anxiety.”

What is maths anxiety?

Mathematics anxiety is officially defined as “a feeling of tension and anxiety that interferes with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations”.

Extreme maths anxiety is thought to affect 2-6% of UK secondary school pupils, although estimates vary, with another study suggesting that a third of UK apprentices experience “noticeable” maths anxiety, while 19% have a tendency to be anxious but may not show such clear signs. Females tend to express more anxiety about maths than males, although studies have suggested this gender gap does not develop until adolescence.

It is separate to dyscalculia, a specific and persistent cognitive difficulty in understanding numbers, although sometimes the two conditions overlap.

Maths anxiety does not necessarily correlate with ability: A 2018 study found that 77% of children with high maths anxiety were normal to high achievers on curriculum maths tests. However, it can limit performance in certain situations and contexts. One possibility is that the worries and intrusive thoughts associated with maths anxiety disrupt or compete for cognitive resources that are needed to solve mathematical problems.

Mathematics

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Pythagorean theorem
Transformations, congruence, and similarity
Arithmetic properties
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Reading and interpreting data
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Exponents, radicals, and scientific notation
Foundations
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Algebra foundations
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Absolute value & piecewise functions
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Quadratics: Multiplying & factoring
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Irrational numbers
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Non-right triangles & trigonometry (Advanced)
Analytic geometry
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Solid geometry
Polynomial arithmetic
Complex numbers
Polynomial factorization
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Polynomial graphs
Rational exponents and radicals
Exponential models
Transformations of functions
Rational functions
Trigonometric functions
Non-right triangles & trigonometry
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Study design
Probability
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Random variables
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Significance tests (hypothesis testing)
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Advanced regression (inference and transforming)
Analysis of variance (ANOVA)
Scatterplots
Data distributions
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Binomial probability
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Displaying and describing quantitative data
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Chi-square tests for categorical data
More on regression
Prepare for the 2020 AP®︎ Statistics Exam
AP®︎ Statistics Standards mappings
Polynomials
Composite functions
Probability and combinatorics
Limits and continuity
Derivatives: definition and basic rules
Derivatives: chain rule and other advanced topics
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Parametric equations, polar coordinates, and vector-valued functions
Applications of integrals
Differentiation: definition and basic derivative rules
Differentiation: composite, implicit, and inverse functions
Contextual applications of differentiation
Applying derivatives to analyze functions
Integration and accumulation of change
Applications of integration
AP Calculus AB solved free response questions from past exams
AP®︎ Calculus AB Standards mappings
Infinite sequences and series
AP Calculus BC solved exams
AP®︎ Calculus BC Standards mappings
Integrals review
Integration techniques
Thinking about multivariable functions
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Applications of multivariable derivatives
Integrating multivariable functions
Green’s, Stokes’, and the divergence theorems
First order differential equations
Second order linear equations
Laplace transform
Vectors and spaces
Matrix transformations
Alternate coordinate systems (bases)

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College students are still struggling with basic math. professors blame the pandemic.

Collin Binkley

Associated Press

FAIRFAX, Va. – Diego Fonseca looked at the computer and took a breath. It was his final attempt at the math placement test for his first year of college. His first three tries put him in pre-calculus, a blow for a student who aced honors physics and computer science in high school.