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“It’s been declining over the years, which is a concern,” said report co-author Michael Kozlow, director of data and support services for EQAO. Those findings parallel the most recent EQAO test results released last summer, which saw a continued five-year decline in the percentages of students meeting the Ontario math standard, although reading and writing results have been rising.

Mr. Kozlow suggested the most recent math findings may have something to do with the heavy attention paid by Ontario’s Liberal government to improving students’ reading and writing skills, starting in the mid-2000s, with math receiving less emphasis.

“We really need to apply that kind of initiative and focus that we applied to literacy … to the area of math,” he said.

John Mighton, the creator of the highly successful JUMP math program says Ontario needs to ensure the teaching approaches it’s asking teachers to use are grounded in findings from cognitive science research. Teachers also need to have the freedom to try new ways to help their students learn math, which should then be “rigorously” tracked to see if the innovation works or not.

“Those things alone would change everything,” said the mathematician, who is also a fellow at Toronto’s Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences.

‘We really need to apply that kind of initiative and focus that we applied to literacy … to the area of math’

Cognitive science shows math mastery comes from repeated practice, he said. That’s not a matter of simply drilling kids with flash cards, but making practice interesting by changing up problems, and incrementally raising the bar, which is how the JUMP math program works. Science research also shows second-nature knowledge of math “facts” (such as multiplication tables or that 7+8=15) is more important than was previously thought and essential for freeing up the working memory required to solve higher-order math problems.