Multiplication Tables

[toodles]

At what age should children know their multiplication tables by heart?

And yet there are still people who think its oppressive

Wrong

It is liberating

Thank god some sense is coming back

All that money pissed away by labour

Appletrees I simply pointed out that Beenneta's anecdote is hardly evidence.

I know much of what is taught in Y6 I didn't encounter until my 2nd year in Grammar school so I could in fact conclude this is evidence that standards are in fact higher ...

I agree with the introduction of sequencing and probability at primary. They are pretty useless without sound arithmetic. I think it has slipped.. used to be y 3/4 for the very good reason that ny the time you ate using them you will progress master if you actually know them. And by y 4 you are certainly using them in other maths.

Sorry phone.

What did all that mean, appletrees?

I agree with the introduction of sequencing and probability at primary.However, they are pretty useless without sound arithmetic.

I think standards have slipped: we were expected to know them before Y5. I finished primary in the early seventes. It used to be 4, for the twelves, Y3 for the others -- for the very good reason that by the time you ate using them you will progress faster if you actually know them.

And by Y4 you are certainly using them in other maths. End of Y5? You're already doing fractions, early algebra, word problems -- it's too late.

by the time you ARE using them

And you can't conclude that standards are higher unless they are higher. You can't just conclude that. There's sound evidence that standards have dropped, the latest tranche of evidence is the comparison with other countries. So a child knowing his tt a year or two later than the parents of course ties in with that and adds to the evidence.

A study presented at the British Educational Research Association?s annual conference in Manchester was particularly useful in this sense, as 3,000 secondary school pupils were presented, last year, with almost identical questions to those a similar sample of children had faced back in 1976 and 1977.

And the results uncovered by this team of highly experienced academics from King?s College, London, and Durham University, were astonishing when one considers the transformation of secondary exam results over the same period, that there has been little change.

The questions ? taken by 11- to 14-year-olds in both eras, were divided into three, testing either algebra, ratio or mastery of the manipulation of decimals. In the last of these three categories, pupils appeared to have improved since the 1970s, perhaps reflecting the greater use of calculators and computers where decimal notation is to the fore, suggested the researchers.

But the 2008 pupils fared roughly the same on the algebra questions as they had in the 1970s. And on the fractions questions, they came off slightly worse than their predecessors of a generation ago.

www.educationbynumbers.org.uk/2009/09/07/maths-understanding-little-changed-since-the-1970s/
Overall, though, the message of these test results was largely ?no change?

Britain nosedives internationally, failure to grasp the basics

One of the reasons we are emigrating to New Zealand next year is it still has a somewhat traditional approach to education and that shows up in the league tables.

The UK private schools still are the best in the world but the state system is falling far behind our major competitors.

Interesting perspective regarding needs for a NC

Appletrees - I wonder what the OECD tests, and how. I also wonder how they choose the 7000 students per country who take the tests. It's all right to nod at the results and use them to support your prejudices, but there are few facts in the report, and it would be interesting to see the raw data.

Actually I rather imagine Mrsz's report to be little more than a PR study, designed to find the results it did. No evidence, but I'd bet real money on it.

And I'm not quite sure what you mean by few facts? Are you sriously suggesting the OECD is not an authoritative or reliable source? Despite Labour taking it seriously when its results were "in favour"?

If you need to undermine the OECD in order to keep faith with the fabulous ahem standards in the NC then that's up to you.

I'm not suggesting anything, and for the record, I felt exactly the same about it when a labour govt was in power.

However, I am aware of the standards in primary schools, and am a bit sceptical about the ample of 7000 children (0.2% of the secondary school population) from an unknown source.

I'd like to know more before making sweeping generalisations.

Sorry - got that wrong - it's only for one year group, isn't it?

So... from what I read, a min of 5000 students take the test per country. There are about 650000 15 yr olds in the UK. That makes a massive % of 0.7%!

I haven't yet found how they choose the sample, but I have found a damning report on PISA's methods.