Wide gap between ‘street maths’ and ‘school maths’, shows study

All children covered in the study were under the age of 17 years, with most in the age group of 13 to 15 years. Further, the working children considered for the study were either currently enrolled in school or had been in school earlier.

Only 1% of schoolchildren could solve practical market problems that over one-third of working children managed easily. The study showed that working children use efficient mental shortcuts while schoolchildren rely on slow, written calculations.

“These findings point to a broader failure of pedagogical practices in India to make usable connections between intuitive and formal understanding of mathematical ideas,” note the researchers from MIT, Harvard University and other institutions in their paper published in Nature journal, analysing this gap between street smarts and school smarts in mathematics.

The study has been carried out by a team at The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, comprising economists Duflo and Banerjee, Swati Bhattacharjee, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Alejandro J Ganimian, Kailash Rajah and Elizabeth S Spelke.

Speaking to The Indian Express on the findings, Duflo said: “The school system is too narrowly siloed. There is home knowledge and then there is school knowledge and the two are not talking to each other, which is bad for school learning and also bad for recognising a lot of talent that’s already out there and we’re missing… a way to rethink the curriculum is to link the two. In the early grades, that can be through games, activities in groups. The key problem here is that kids are taught an algorithm to solve a problem. They are taught that this is how you are supposed to solve a problem. Then they half understand the algorithm, so when they try to apply it, it doesn’t quite work out.”

To assess children and how adept they are at street maths and school maths, the surveyors purchased “unusual quantities” of two goods from children working in markets — like 800 gm of potatoes at Rs 20 per kg and 1.4 kg of onions at Rs 15 per kg. They found that most children could do the maths associated with their jobs, often mentally and with no paper aids. However, the same children struggled with school mathematics.

So, for instance, of the 201 children in Kolkata from whom enumerators for the study purchased “unusual quantities” of two goods — not familiar quantities or round amounts for which they may have learnt the costs by rote — 95%, 97% and 98% children correctly answered the total amount due and the amount to be returned in three transactions.

In contrast, when they were given problems that are used for NGO Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), only 32% could solve division of a three-digit number by a one-digit number, and only 54% could solve two subtractions of one two-digit number from another. Almost all these children had attended second grade when subtraction is taught.

The study noted that the difference was not one of difficulty between the two types of arithmetic problems, since the market transactions are more complex and “involve several operations”, compared to the written arithmetic problems on ASER.

Similarly, of the 400 children working in markets in Delhi, 96%, 99% and 97% succeeded in three market problems by their second try.

To see if maths skills in school transfer to real-world situations, 200 non-working schoolchildren in Delhi were surveyed. They were found to be able to solve school-type arithmetic problems with “high accuracy” when given unlimited time and paper.

A total of 56% of non-working children could clear the division exercises as presented in school, compared to only 15% of the working children in Delhi. In contrast, when they were given hypothetical market problems, only around 60% could calculate the amount due in transactions. These children were found to rely heavily on pen and paper and used strategies that involved several steps to solve a problem.

On how these findings compare with other countries, Duflo said there are not many studies of this kind, except for an old one on five out-of-school Brazilian children who showed they could calculate well.

“What this is similar to is…in my country, France, students do very badly on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). One of the reasons that has been invoked is that PISA has a lot of practical questions — that’s not how French students are taught maths. They’re taught maths in this very abstract way and they are unable to apply them. Different school systems are different. The Singapore maths system insists on perpetual back-and-forth between practical problems and more theoretical problems precisely to try and avoid this problem. Whether or not they’re successful, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be unique. It is perhaps more acute in countries like India or France that have very abstract curricula.” she said.