Merging High Order Mathematics Missions In Middle Schools

The results of the 2018 PISA assessment revealed that only 8.8 % of Israel’s 15 year old students meet the test’s standards of excellence. Although a much larger rate of students learn in the highest ability group of mathematics in middle school in Israel, the curriculum and teaching are typically geared towards procedural fluency and technique. Only a handful of special excellence programs, offered to approximately 15% of the students, teach more hours and therefore hold the potential to engage students in more applied mathematics. However, the content these programs currently use, focuses mostly on enrichment or acceleration, and not on application.

One of these excellence programs is Mofet. The Mofet Association was established in 1997 as a not-for-profit organization, by educators and scientists who immigrated to Israel from the FSU during the ’90s. Their goal was to develop educational excellence in mathematics, physics and computer science, initially for children of new immigrants and later on for everyone. Today the program is spread throughout the country in 142 schools, with 700 excellence classes that include 20,000 students. Each school that opens a Mofet excellence class in middle school receives six weekly supplementary hours.Two of these additional hours are dedicated to mathematics. In these hours, 350 mathematics teachers use a designated curriculum that was specifically created in order to accelerate students’ knowledge and proficiency and prepare them towards the five-unit track in high school. In discussion with the management of Mofet, they estimated that their students will find the PISA assignments very difficult to solve. They stressed that their current mathematics program is not focused on high order mathematical thinking and its applications in real world contexts.

To address this need, Mofet are planning a three-year program which will be offered to their 350 mathematics teachers. They plan to guide at least 270 of them on how to systematically teach by using high order and applied mathematical assignments. Initially, Mofet’s mathematics pedagogy team will undergo a 30-hour summer course and another 30 hours during the year guided by an academic institution. During this course, they will become familiar with context-based mathematics, reasoning skills and conceptual knowledge that constitute the PISA mathematics framework. They will be exposed to such assignments and prepare the groundwork to introduce them to their teachers. Following this preparatory seminar, over three years, the mathematics teachers will be trained in groups of 20-25, and learn how to implement the new content and the appropriate teaching methods to be used in their classes. They will participate in a three-day seminar in the summer to prepare them for the coming school year, and a professional development course of 30 hours during the year. In addition, the teachers will receive instructional coaching from the mathematics pedagogy team to support them with the implementation of the new mathematics content. Mofet has committed that at least one hour a week will be dedicated routinely to this new content in 8^th and 9^th grades, and that the success of the program will be measured by using a diagnostic test that will assess performance, with a goal for at least 80% of the students successfully meet the 5-6 PISA levels in mathematics.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 378