Sunday, December 6, 2009

How Does Singapore Math Differ from US Textbooks?

Now in our 5th year of using SPM at Keys School, we feel it has 5 major advantages:

1. Strong number sense. Math facts are not memorized in SPM, but visualized, internalized, and understood. Manipulatives are used heavily to train base-10 sense -- much more so than in US textbooks. Then there are pages and pages of pictorial representations in the workbooks giving students time to TRANSFER their learning into strong number sense. This pictorial transfer phase is what is most critically missing in US textbooks.

2. Mental math mastery: Mental math is a fun and challenging component of daily math instruction all the way through middle school. Rather than concentrating on speed, mental math is presented one problem at a time, with the emphasis on DIFFERENT ways of solving each problem using different approaches.

3. Depth of curriculum: SPM does not use the quick-spiraling approach that US textbooks use. ("If it's Tuesday, It Must Be Fractions"). SPM uses long units; each 3- or 4-week long unit has a minimum quantum of learning, plus additional levels of enrichment. Students have time to truly understand a concept, and successfully transfer it to the abstract in their own minds, and therefore do not need re-teaching.

4. Word problem modeling: The visual nature of SPM rectangle models allows students to tackle word problems with confidence. Even those learners who struggle with math (and especially word problems) learn to solve complex problems because they can SEE them.

5. Algebra readiness: Because of the emphasis on understanding of math concepts, rather than memorizing algorithms, students actually transition more easily to algebra with SPM. They say it is just "arithmetic with letters instead of numbers". At Keys we have seen a constant increase in algebra ability of our 8th graders since we adopted SPM. Most importantly, the "non-math" students who used to struggle and fail algebra are now succeeding.

The only disadvantage we've discovered is that adopting SPM required training for our math teachers, who needed to discard the algorithms they were taught and teach math from a conceptual, mathematical basis. Corrinne did our training, and it was brilliant!

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