Grant amount
NIS 10,000,000
Professional Support to Adapt the National Middle School Mathematics Curriculum
Professional Support to Adapt the National Middle School Mathematics Curriculum to Include Applied Skills Needed in the 21st Century World
Professional Support to Adapt the National Middle School Mathematics Curriculum to Include Applied Skills Needed in the 21st Century World
In recent years, the Trump Foundation has seeded the development of a rich portfolio of challenging learning materials in mathematics for middle schools. The new material aims to address specific applied mathematical skills that were not part of the national mathematics curriculum. However, they are aligned with innovative science, technology, and global standards for education in the 21st century. Hundreds of teachers were trained to use the new materials, while municipalities, districts and school networks opened dozens of new excellence classes across the country, in which these new materials were tested.
As feedback from students and teachers is highly positive, the Ministry of Education is now preparing to include the applied skills within its formal curriculum. The ministry sees this new policy as part of its larger renewal effort to update curricula and make learning in school more relevant to the current era. It also aims to better adjust the content and skills taught in middle school to the framework of international standards, such as the PISA research. In the PISA research, only 8.8% of Israeli students achieved high performance levels (compared to an OECD average of 10.9%), with a very high rate of low achievers.
A recent study of Israel’s performance on the PISA research, conducted by Professor Zbigniew Marciniak and his team, pointed to specific areas for improvement. The study showed that while Israeli students are able to implement mathematical technique, they find it very difficult to understand a real world problem and represent it in a mathematical model. Particularly in geometry, when mathematics becomes two and three dimensional, Israeli students struggle with translating the physical world into mathematical models that would help in understanding and solving the problem.
Therefore, the ministry decided to adapt the curriculum and to this end, it invited the University of Haifa to provide academic leadership and professional assistance. The University of Haifa’s Education Department is recognized and highly regarded for the quality of its research and training. For more than a decade, it has been operating the National Center for Teachers of Mathematics on behalf of the ministry, and is a veteran partner of the foundation. Professor Roza Leikin, the dean of education, is a former chair of the ministry’s Mathematics Curriculum Committee and the champion of many of the foundation’s programs.
In recent months, Leikin gathered a team of distinguished scholars from the Technion, Tel Aviv University and renowned institutions abroad in order to together define the adaptations required. They analyzed mathematics curricula of high performing education systems worldwide, reviewed the most cutting-edge research and compared it with the Israeli curriculum. Following this comparison, they presented a framework of standards that incorporates a range of concepts, techniques, and skills that are required for students in order to develop high order thinking and application abilities.
They recommended that the current curriculum integrate several missing elements, particularly those that involve mathematical modeling from diverse real-world contexts and the ability to move between different mathematical representations. They pointed to the importance of flexibility skills in order to solve problems in different ways, as well as research and discovery skills and using experiential learning and collaboration with peers as part of developing reasoning and argumentation abilities.
Consequently, the ministry asked the university to lead the adaptation of the curriculum, with the goal of raising the performance of middle school students in grades 7 to 9 and achieving high order thinking and application skills and better abilities for solving real-world problems within four years. The ultimate goal will be measured by Israeli students reaching the OECD average by the 2025 PISA cycle (an average score, an increase from 463 to 500) and a jump in the rate of high performing students from 8.8% to 11%.
In the first stage, the program team will prepare a framework of standards weaving the new skills into the current concepts of the middle school curriculum. At least 90 learning tasks that were already developed by the foundation’s partners in Hebrew and Arabic will be selected to align with the framework and will be integrated into the ministry’s central database of learning tasks used by mathematics teachers. Skills and topics that are still not covered by these tasks will be further developed and incorporated into the database. Implementation in classroom will start in seventh and eighth grades in the first year and as of the second year, also in ninth grade.
In order to prepare the teachers to teach the new skills, the program will operate a four-year professional development and mentoring scheme. During the first year of the program, the university will conduct a seminar for 240 teacher leaders and instructors. Eighty of them will be selected to lead 100 teachers’ learning communities over three years and to provide instructional coaching for department heads in schools. With these activities, they will reach 2,500 of the middle school mathematics teachers, representing about half of all Israeli middle school mathematics teachers, nationwide.
The University of Haifa approached the foundation to seek its support for leading the program, with an emphasis on the development and adaptation of learning material, instructional coaching, and training teacher leaders.
* The text above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 501