The Power of Singapore Math

Rachel Chan | my paper | Fri Sep 3 2010

School which used Singapore Maths went on to boost maths grades by about 30 per cent over five years.

AMAZED by how well maths coach Bill Jackson's eighth grade class responded to their colourful maths textbooks, with their pictures of tropical fruit and use of British English, the principal decided the whole school should use them.

Students at the elementary school in New Jersey, one of the first in the United States to use Singapore Mathematics, went on to boost their maths grades by about 30 per cent over five years, said Mr Jackson, 51, who now trains maths teachers in New York. He is in Singapore for a Singapore maths forum.

"The students were really engaged because they liked the concrete-pictorial-abstract approach, and especially the model method," he added, referring to the way Singapore's maths textbooks depicted maths concepts and taught students how to solve problem sums.

Mr Jackson started adapting the Singapore curriculum for his class in 1999, having been impressed after a friend sent him some sample pages from a Singaporean maths teachers' guide. That year was one of four in which Singapore's Primary 4 and Secondary 2 students (equivalent to fourth- and eighth-grade students in the US) topped international rankings for their achievements in Maths and Science.

Piqued by anecdotes like Mr Jackson's, the US-based Gabriella & Paul Rosenbaum Foundation conducted a study from 2003 to 2008 to establish just how well Singapore maths textbooks do in the US.

It found, for instance, that students taking Singapore maths classes in the North Middlesex Regional School District, the first district-wide implementation of the curriculum in the US, scored significantly higher than students from other districts on Massachusetts state exams.

It also found the curriculum was more effective the earlier students started using it.

Today, schools in about 110 districts in the US use Singapore Maths curriculum materials published by Marshall Cavendish. The latest is an elementary grade textbook called Math In Focus, which is the US edition of Singapore's My Pals Are Here! (Maths) series.

Schools in over 35 countries are also using Singapore maths textbooks.

"With the US mathematics textbooks, teachers try to figure out how to cover several pages in one lesson. By contrast, with the Singapore mathematics textbooks, teachers need to deepen their (students') understanding of mathematics, so they can spend several days on less than one page in order to help students understand the concepts deeply," said Dr Patsy Wang-Iverson, vice-president for special projects of the Gabriella & Paul Rosenbaum Foundation, who will today present key findings of the study at an inaugural global Singapore maths forum, held by Marshall Cavendish.

Ms Lee Fei Chen, deputy head of publishing at Marshall Cavendish Publishing Group, said the earliest importers of Singapore maths textbooks in the US were homeschoolers who wanted alternative programmes to the core US syllabus.

Subsequently, "a lot of (attention to Singapore's maths syllabus) was (paid ) by one or two committed teachers, convinced that this was a good programme, and they wanted to try it out in their schools", said Ms Lee.