Here’s the Proof that Math is Hot These Days 

In a contribution to the Washington Post, Dominic Basulto says that Maryam Mirzakhani could do for mathematics what astronaut Sally Ride did for space travel: give young girls a role model for someone they’d like to be when they grow up.  The 37-year-old Iranian-born Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford, has been awarded the 2014 Fields Medal–the most prestigious honor in mathematics.

Here is a New York Times article on Mirzakhani’s award.

Kids’ brains reorganize when learning math skills

Stanford University research funded by the National Institutes of Health explains how the brain reorganizes itself as kids learn math.

Healthy children start making that switch between counting to what’s called fact retrieval when they’re 8 years old to 9 years old, when they’re still working on fundamental addition and subtraction. How well kids make that shift to memory-based problem-solving is known to predict their ultimate math achievement.

“Experience really does matter,” said Dr. Kathy Mann Koepke of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research.

In a series of recent stories, The Australian newspaper highlights the success of Singapore’s students on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam and describes the value of its curriculum.

The paper cited a report by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority that compared the Singapore and Australian curriculums. It found Singapore schools spent about twice as much time on basic operations and geometry in the first few years of school and had a greater focus on problem solving (from “A lesson learnt…” see below)

The Australian then reports that Scholastic Australia will be publishing a new set of textbooks based on the Singapore model that, “enable children to gain a deeper and better understanding of mathematical content and ways of working.”

Here is an article and an editorial from The Australian:

Kids get Asian lesson in maths

The Australian, April 12, 2014:

Schools in Australia will be able to teach maths Singapore-style with the release next month of primary textbooks that set out the teaching methods responsible for taking Singaporean students to the top of international tests.

A lesson learnt from Singapore

In an editorial on April 15, 2014, The Australian was encouraged by the forthcoming release of new textbooks based on the Singapore model. To be published by Scholastic Australia, the texts will be linked to the Australian curriculum and endorsed by the Singapore Ministry of Education.