Teachers say Dutch numeracy teaching needs improvement. “It drives kids crazy.”

Mathematics teachers are not surprised that Dutch primary school students often do not achieve primary school level in arithmetic and mathematics.

His ears were flapping. Math teacher Henk Vigter testified that one of the students he was tutoring did not know how many centimeters fit into a meter. “If your math skills aren't high enough, how can you explain that to the class later?” says Vigter.

The mathematics teacher is not surprised that three out of four students in pre-vocational secondary education have not yet mastered subjects from primary school, as shown in a new report by the Education Inspectorate. Among HAVO and VWO sophomores, 20 percent were below the level they should have been at the start of high school.

The teacher believes that to change the course, the level of teachers in mathematics must be raised. “We are in a vicious circle where many teachers are not good enough at numeracy. Students learn very little of this and then go to the same teacher training college that their teachers come from.

Vigter wonders why, for example, old-fashioned long division, which in his view is an excellent way to learn division, has disappeared from the classroom. “You now hear many teachers say that doing long division is a trick. These are often the people who can't explain it well enough themselves.

No more stomping

Pedagogist Peter Langerak from the Dutch Mathematical Institute attributes the poor arithmetic skills of Dutch students to the way education is structured. According to Langrak, traditional mashing is increasingly giving way to arithmetic with context, such as combining stories with a lot of language to learn addition and subtraction. According to him, it only happens this way in the Netherlands. “There has been no proper research at all on whether it actually teaches you how to count.”

To find out what works, Langerak looked to England, where mathematics education has undergone a major transformation in the past decade. He says there is more structure in the lessons there, and that's what works. “In the Netherlands, for example, we teach mathematics with sum and division on Mondays and arithmetic with time on Wednesdays.”

This does not happen in England. “They take much longer to get a deeper understanding. There is an ordering of skills. If you learn ratio tables for the first time, you can easily create percentile sums. Everything is now mixed up in our education.”

Numeracy across the curriculum

Students interviewed in the Education Inspectorate report indicate that they often find numeracy and mathematics lessons very chaotic. They do not like the profession and do not see its purpose.

To change this, St. Boniface College in Utrecht is trying to better integrate numeracy education into other subjects. “What is in textbooks is determined by publishers and explained differently in each teaching method for each subject. This is confusing. “It drives the kids crazy,” says Kees Hoyman, a math and physics teacher and math coordinator at the school.

This is why Utrecht School now practices 'cross-curricular numeracy', which is how the same method of numeracy is practiced in every lesson. For example, a ratio table is often used where numbers are placed in the table. Whether in economics, physics, mathematics or chemistry.

Hoyman sees this paying off. “Since we started doing this, the fun has increased. About 40 percent of our students now choose a subject like physics in their portfolio. This is great, because we need all these technicians in the community.”

Games don't work

Mathematics teacher Sascha van Lovren says mathematics is only fun when things go well. She has taught the classroom for twenty years and watched students flourish when they finally mastered it. “Take the analogies. No student thinks, 'Yes, I'll start that.' But after that struggle you also get a reward if you succeed and an incentive to keep going.”

In her early years, Van Lovren sometimes tried to “spice up” her lessons with number games. “Then they will have a nice lesson, but they won’t learn anything. I also see that this improvement of lessons is reflected in the teaching methods with many pictures and story problems. This is counterproductive.”

What to do? Maintaining order in the classroom and explaining it step by step, says Van Lovren. “Many Dutch lessons are restless. Then the explanation is good, but then it becomes a complete mess. Then you won't learn well and won't be able to take the next step. Anyone who can't multiply won't be able to calculate with fractions later either.”

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Pupils in the lower grades are so poor in mathematics that they may not be able to function well in society later on, the Education Inspectorate says in a new report. Nearly three out of every four VMBO students do not reach the required level.