What sort of maths learner are you?

How would you characterise yourself? as a maths learner??

In one word??

Me?

Maybe, absorbent? Or, compliant??

I realise now that I lacked any critical questioning of what was going on in my maths lessons at school. If I didn't immediately understand what was mathematically happening in class, I went away and read the text book on my own, and persevered until I "got it." Such behaviour is, in general, in our Mastering Maths GCSE resit research classes, far from the that of the students.

Setting aside many of our students' obvious reasons for lacking interest and engagement, such as previous lack of success, low levels of motivation, little insight into mathematical ideas and so on, I'd like to suggest that many students don't actually understand why they are being asked to do much of the mathematics they are asked to do. It must, for them, appear to have little immediate use, and in many cases not even any potential future use. What’s our story about the mathematics we teach? Do we have one?

Some years ago now I was very fortunate to have a meeting with some games developers at EA Sports who had been considering the MAP materials that colleagues in the Nottingham Shell Centre had been developing. We spent some time talking about the design principles of the materials and the conversation then moved on to the? work of EA Sports adventure games developers.

Although not a game player myself I was intrigued about how players understand the hidden complex narratives of adventure games and how they seem easily to understand what to do at any level of the game and how that will help them when they move onwards and upwards. One developer acknowledged this and told me “oh yes. You need to gather charm at level 4, say, so that you will be able to overcome the Snake Lord at Level 6”. In the parallel world of maths we have some similar requirements: if you understand the structure of and arithmetic operations getting to grips with algebra is so much easier. But my observations of resit students working in the classroom is that they have little idea that there is a structure to number (and all areas of mathematics) and that we are systematic when we work in the world of maths. Somehow these ideas have escaped students for eleven years or more.

Could we have a new curriculum (post curriculum and assessment review) that makes some of the implicit explicit and comes clean about the what we are doing and why?

What is the game we are playing?

What is our narrative about what we are doing and why?

I see curriculum specification as a design challenge that we should take very seriously. As adventure games designers have found it pays dividends in the long run if players understand what they need to do and why.