How many periods per week should students be studying Maths?

Beth has asked for an opinion on the following:

"I was wondering what your opinion as head of the maths association is regarding the number of periods/week that students should be studying Maths. My daughter’s school is going to 3 periods a week for the general maths students in Year 10 and I was just curious whether this was something that was happening elsewhere."

Response from Michelle Ostberg

Hi Beth,

It is difficult to comment on '3 periods per week' as periods vary in length. Current practice generally starts from around 200 minutes per week and is sometimes more, depending on individual school structures and decisions. This has decreased over the last ten years as other learning areas have needed to increase their time allocation in order to develop students skills to the point where they can study senior school courses for university entrance in that learning area.

There have been quite a few changes regarding education that have impacted on both the amount of time spent in Mathematics classes and how that time is spent. Mathematics teaching has evolved. Our mathematics teachers are reflective and conscientious and work to make sure their students are developing understanding of the concepts they are teaching, and they are getting better and more efficient at doing this. New technologies also help to make this process more efficient and allow teachers to focus student work on higher order concepts of problem solving, interpretation, and real-world application of their mathematics skills. However, as curriculum is changing and all 8 learning areas are being acknowledged as equally important for a variety of reasons, this has seen the available time being shared among the learning areas which has seen many schools decrease the time traditionally allocated to mathematics classes. Also, mathematics curriculum has evolved to include more topics and concepts than previously. MAWA members have expressed concern that with less time to cover more concepts they find it very difficult to help individual students develop their skills and understandings to the necessary depth. When this is added to the current proposals regarding national testing on which teacher and school performance is often erroneously judged it is creating a climate of pushing to meet goals and quickly cover a lot of material in preparation for tests, rather than being able to focus on developing deeper understandings of the concepts and development of numeracy skills. Unlike literacy, which is seen as the responsibility of all teachers to develop, numeracy is still seen by many as the responsibility of mathematics teachers. Mathematics teachers are then placed in the difficult position of having to strike a balance between meaningful learning which includes preparation of students for their futures, and raising test performance on concepts which teachers will have difficulty covering to sufficient depth in the limited time available. All teachers would like to see their learning areas allocated more time and teachers of mathematics are no different in this respect.

Regards,
Michelle

Michelle Ostberg
President
Mathematical Association of Western Australia (MAWA)