SCHOOLS: Teachers support math texts

Palo Alto elementary teachers like concepts, but say they need guidance

Palo Alto elementary school teachers for grades 3 through 5 were generally pleased with the "Investigations" math series adopted by the school district last year, survey results show.

However, some teachers thought the school board and school district should give some guidance on how to use these books in conjunction with more traditional teaching methods.

The Investigations series was chosen by the school board in the spring of 1996 as the text for elementary school math curriculum after much debate in the community. It is considered more of a "new, new math" text than some of the others, but is balanced with a more traditional book, Holt's "Mathematics Unlimited."

The Investigation's books were at the center of controversy recently when the state Board of Education rejected the Curriculum Committee's recommendation of the second and fifth grade books in the series.

For the survey, 29 teachers were interviewed by Stanford graduate students in the School of Education after their first year of using the Dale Seymour "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space" textbooks. From that, a 46-question survey was created and send out to all 83 third, fourth and fifth grade teachers in the district, of whom 51 responded.

The survey results showed that a vast majority of teachers thought the textbooks "facilitated student involvement in learning math" (90 percent) and a "positive attitude toward math among students" (84 percent).

Melissa Beressi, a third-grade teacher at L.M. Nixon Elementary School agreed.

"(The Investigations series) has a lot of great ideas that allows the kids to learn concepts more easily," she said. "There is more choice for the teacher about what concepts to do first."

One example she gave was how children learned their multiplication tables. Instead of memorizing the tables, the children get a sheet and fill in circles next to the numbers for every multiple of the number. Beressi said she teaches her kids to think of multiplication as adding a group of numbers.

The survey indicated, however, that more than half the teachers (54 percent) were unclear about how to use the Investigations in conjunction with a more traditional book published by Holt.

"The message we received from the teachers is that they need a clearer message from the (school) board about which way to go about integrating the two texts," said Haggai Kupermintz, the Stanford graduate student who conducted the survey.

Beressi said this is common with new texts.

"Anytime teachers get new teaching materials there is a bit of a learning curve," she said. She added that at Nixon the teachers were using their staff development days to discuss how to use the texts.

The school board agreed the teachers should be given help to learn the new texts.

"My proposal would be to use the district's resources to pay some teachers to develop a lesson guide or a road map of the new texts," said school board President John Tuomy. "It's now up to the superintendent (Don Phillips) and his staff to come up with a plan and come back (to the board) with a proposal."

Overall, Tuomy said, the board is pleased with the results of the survey.

"The fact that the tests scores (Stanford Achievement and CFAS) stayed the same is positive," he said. "Often when a new curriculum is introduced the scores go down. I think it means the teachers are doing a good job."

--Charlie Breitrose

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