Implementation Of Applied Mathematics Assignments

The Education Ministry’s Central District is responsible for 320,000 high school students, who reside in 56 cities and study in 132 schools. In 2018, 21% of its twelfth grade students matriculated in the five-unit track in mathematics. This number signifies impressive progress which was an outcome of a multi-year effort by the District’s leadership, its mathematics instructors and teachers. In collaboration with the Branco Weiss Institute and with several grants from the Trump Foundation, the District opened more five-unit classes and created a support network for the teachers.

However, in analyzing the performance of the students, the District and Branco Weiss noted that there are still holes in the transition from middle school to high school due to the gap between the two stages. Many students arrive ill-prepared in tenth grade and struggle with the expectation for higher order mathematical thinking. Particularly, they find difficulty in understanding mathematics within a context and in tackling complex problems. Their learning focuses on technique and on preparation for the test, rather than on deeper understanding.

In order to bridge this gap, the District and Branco Weiss started working on this issue a couple of years ago with assistance of a grant from the foundation. Their focus then was to create a smoother transition between ninth and tenth grade. Now, they wish to go deeper into middle school and work with seventh and eighth grades as well. The purpose of the proposed three-year program is to focus on the applied content. They plan to integrate learning tasks that are currently developed in universities. These new tasks use advanced mathematics in real-world contexts, aiming to reach the high PISA levels (5-6). The District and Branco Weiss aim to select a series of such tasks, build a teaching sequence and train the teachers to implement them in their classrooms.

This process will require initial training of District instructors by the developers from the universities. Then, 150 mathematics teachers who teach in 240 excellence classes and high ability groups will be organized into professional learning communities. The communities will be jointly led by experts from Branco Weiss and the District who will combine expertise in mathematics teaching with effective pedagogy. Each community will meet for 60 hours a year.

In these communities, the teachers will learn how to teach their students using the new tasks, then try them out in their classroom, and return to the community for feedback and improvements. The district will ensure that the new tasks are taught for at least one hour a week annually. A diagnostic tool developed by CET will be used to measure the success of the program, in line with PISA levels 5-6 , with the aim that after three years, 75% of the students will meet this bar.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 400