Episode 167: Engaging girls in maths

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School Podcast.

Welcome to the School of School Podcast.

Robin Potter

So welcome back to another episode of the School of School of School of School.

Andy Psarianos

School of School Podcast I think it's called.

Robin Potter

The School of School Podcast. You're throwing me off because I'm here today live with Andy.

Andy Psarianos

Hi.

Robin Potter

And Adam. Hello.

Adam Gifford

How you doing, Robin?

Robin Potter

Pretty well. I have to adjust to having this one in the room with me, but other than that, I'm good. Thanks. We also have a special guest here today, Louise Hoskyns-Staples. Welcome, Louise. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

Hi, nice to be back. I'm Louise Hoskyns-Staples. I work as a teacher educator, supporting teachers in schools. I have a background in first of all, primary education and then secondary education and sometime working in university supporting trainee teachers.

In amongst all of that mix, I've been interested in the research around education and particularly teacher education. I have another focus, which is what today's podcast is about, and I have an interest in gender.

Robin Potter

Excellent. Yes. So we are going to be talking about gender, specifically about engaging girls in maths. I think this is going to be great.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

My interest started, well, I think it's always been there, but the research interest started when a colleague asked if I'd support her in writing up a piece of research she'd done. She had some ideas about how to write it up.

My colleague was Dr. Karen Blackmore at the University of Worcester. She'd done Lego project with some girls to look at how that helped them develop their spatial awareness and their understanding of maths. My initial job was to do the literature review for the book chapter, which is lovely. I got to read an awful lot.

What was clear that there was some very, very big studies, and this is a multinational problem. Girls don't see themselves as being very good at maths and they don't see maths as being as important in their lives as they might if they are of a male gender.

So that got me really, really thinking about what can we do about this? This starts from what's frightening is children start to make gender choices from the age of one about toys. They choose different toys because they've been given different toys.

Children, very, very young children, children as young as five, six, cease to associate cleverness with their gender. The female students are, when asked, when interviewed primary school, see genius as male. They see cleverness as male. These things are exaggerated when it comes to subjects like maths.

What I wanted to do is really, really dig in, and I'm not alone in having done this. This has been looked at quite a lot, but I wanted to know what was going to help girls do better. So I looked at a range of studies. PISA had done a study and they looked at problem solving. We talked about problem solving a lot in maths, and this is Math's No Problem. It has a problem solving approach.

One of the things, they looked at, two things. Individual problem solving, so working alone, boys outperform girls internationally in PISA tests. Then collaborative problem solving, so working together and talking to each other, girls outperform boys.

I thought, this is how we teach. When we sit and we look at an anchor task, we discuss it together. We sit in groups, we work together, we collaborate. We ask our pupils to work and to think. Other areas that girls excel in were communication. So if you can involve a lot of communication in your lessons, if they talk to each other, then the girls are going to do better.

I thought of a Maths No Problem lesson. I thought about journaling. Sometimes journaling is individual. Quite often it's individual, but it quite often involves a conversation, a dialogic scenario. Math classrooms, in a Maths No Problem classroom, children are talking to each other and they're sharing their learning. They're supporting each other with their learning. They're trying to find something out together.

So for me, I think if I had my time over again with my daughter who didn't enjoy maths at school, she got through maths. I would teach her at home. If she missed some school, I'd teach her at home, she'd find maths quite easy. She'd go back into school where it was very much board work and book work, and she wouldn't perform that well. She got through maths quite comfortably when it was compulsory and then dropped it like a hot stone.

Our girls perform reasonably well, but they don't excel and they don't choose to take maths beyond the age of 16 when it ceases to be compulsory. So looking at what they need, they need a collaborative classroom. They need projects to solve together, things that are exciting.

The other thing that girls like is maths that's related to the real world. They like to see a purpose. So giving girls the opportunity to explore something and they can relate that to their own lives, they can see that this could happen in the real world, that it's got importance and it's got value.

Again, if I look through Maths No Problem examples, lessons, I can find opportunities. Whereas a teacher, I could bring that into the real world and talk to them about the purpose behind that.

What I will say is if you teach girls in ways that girls learn well, boys do better anyway. So we're not advantaging one gender over another, but we're enabling one gender to learn much, much better and to feel better about themselves in maths.

I now have run, oh, this is about the fifth year, I run some projects each year now where teachers go away and they research their own practise in school. I worked with some SLEs, so people who work with maths in schools in Cambria, first of all. They went off and worked with teachers and math leads in schools, putting into place methods for teaching mathematics that would support girls.

Each year I've run some small research projects, some up in the northwest of England and some local to me in Birmingham and the Midlands. Looking, and each year teachers take a group of their own students. I ask them to think of a small group of students, maybe... Once I was talking about the different groups. I gave them some scenarios with girls.

One teacher said to me in the summer when she was doing her presentation, she said, "I sat there thinking I've got three of them. I've got those quiet, good girls that sit in the middle. Never say boo to a goose, don't do anything wrong, and I can basically ignore them." Her project was to target those girls. So what she did was whole class, but she made sure that her focus was those girls.

Other teachers have done some lovely things in their own lessons, starting with a talk task. So what we would call in Maths No Problem world, an anchor task, they were finding talk tasks to use. Just getting the students to talk to each other at the start of each lesson.

I never expect to see a hard data impact from projects like that. I say to the teachers at the start, you shouldn't expect to see any hard data. We had quite a lot of hard data impact last year on some of my research projects because the girls, they were engaged and it was making a big difference to them.

So yeah, that's where that came from. That's my interest. There are other things now that I suppose I focus more and I notice things that come out in the media that are less positive, where girls are performing less well. I sit there thinking about how do we address that?

Adam Gifford

Can I ask a question, Louise? You may not have the data in front of you, and I always think whenever we do international comparisons, there's always got to be a health warning on them because they're different places. I'm just wondering that last set of PISA data that was released at the end of last year and that discrepancy between boys and girls. I'm just wondering with that collaborative aspect, I don't have the data in front of me, I'm just asking whether you know it or not.

Say, let's take a country like Singapore, whether the gender discrepancy, but the overall PISA trend or because I'm just thinking of that collaborative nature of discussion, discourse, those sorts of things that I think would be, most people would say it'd be very well established in most Singaporean schools. I just wonder in those systems that have that as an aspect of their day-to-day lessons, I just wonder whether or not that discrepancy existed, was as obvious, was different. I'm not sure.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

So the discrepancy exists almost everywhere. It doesn't exist so much in countries where the main subject of achievement is business. So if we think of the Emirates, places like that, girls tend to do better in STEM because the boys focus on business and the girls will tend to do better instead.

Elsewhere, unfortunately the gender view is true. Collaborative problem solving wasn't analysed in the last set of PISA results. It was the set before. I don't have the data to hand to be able to answer that question well enough on performance. So I'm afraid, sorry, I can't do that.

Adam Gifford

No, no, no, no. I'm just interested. That's something that we can go away and find. I just think it would be interesting to see that.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

I think it would be really nice to see. Yeah.

Robin Potter

So it sounds like Maths No Problem is ideal for girls.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

Yeah. In one of our podcasts, we talked about analysing some data, and this is some data I would like to look at. I'd really like to look at that gender difference and see whether it's as marked in schools that use Maths No Problem as it is in other schools.

For me as well, it's not just hard performance, it's how girls feel about themselves. One of my postgraduate students for his thesis, his dissertation, he did a project with his teacher. They did a combined project and he wrote up something slightly different from what she did. They looked at how the girls and the boys felt about themselves in the classroom and they had the hard data in front of them.

The girls were predominantly towards the top half. The very, very high performing, there were a couple of boys at the very, very front. The girls were, if you took them, they were more than halfway over. So the top was predominantly girls. When they asked the children to line themselves up in order of who they thought was best in the class do, whereas the girls predominantly put themselves at the bottom of the class.

So that perception of self is really, really marked in girls. I think that's what I'd like to know with Maths No Problem school. I'd like to do some interviews and find out and see whether do these girls feel the same or because of the style of learning, do they have a better view of maths?

Robin Potter

Yeah, I'd love to know, and I'd love to know how we start to change that whole mindset in our girls.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

I think what I've seen aspirations from girls in my little research projects I do, the teachers give their students a baseline and they ask the girls what do they want to be in the future? Usually those roles are very female, traditional female roles. By the end of the project, these girls will want to be anything.

One school did a lovely project. They looked at famous female mathematicians back in the days of looking at NASA right through to modern times. The children have such lovely aspirations. I want to take maths because I want to be the person who cures, who finds the world cure for.

Really starting to think about the fact that they can succeed and achieve because they've looked at these women who had been successful in maths. I don't think there's enough celebration of that. So yeah, it's raising those aspirations, but also giving them the right environment in which to learn maths.

One thing I will say in all the background reading I did, there are no differences in the male and female brain that account for our differences in how we perform in maths and English in school. The differences within the male brain, if you put all males together and the differences within all the female brains are greater than the differences are where the male and female brains sit.

Performance in maths and English early on is if you're good at one subject, you should be good at both. If you struggle in one, you should struggle in both. So yes, we don't actually have a gender split that comes out in all the research. It is just society and how children learn.

Andy Psarianos

So I just pulled up the PISA results while you were talking, Louise.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

Excellent.

Andy Psarianos

Just out of curiosity, I hope I'm interpreting these correctly. The difference between boys and girls in Singapore and the difference between boys and girls in England is about the same. What I will say, and yes, the boys are slightly higher than the girls, but not outrageously so, like in some other countries. Some countries, it's ridiculous the gap. We don't need to get into that right now.

The girls in Singapore by the age of 15, are about two years further ahead than the boys in England. England is not doing all that bad. So you can do things that improves the results of all pupils. You don't have to teach maths in a way that's detrimental to one gender group. Which is the point that you made, which is that you can teach ways that are preferential to one gender group, but you don't have to and it doesn't pay off.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

I would suspect that we probably do teach maths in a way that's preferential to one gender group at the moment.

Andy Psarianos

We don't have to.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

I think that's part of the discrepancy. We don't have to. We can look at ways that benefit girls and watch our boys do better as well.

Andy Psarianos

Well, that's it. I think you're absolutely right. It's the same thing, it's not just across gender, it's also across socioeconomic groups. What helps the most struggling learners, the way you need to teach in order to help the most struggling learners benefits the most able ones as well. The highest performers as well.

It's the same... I think what you said, which is really profound, is that if you teach maths well, which means teaching it so that it's good for the girls, it's also good... You're not making it bad for the boys. You're making it better for the boys as well.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

Yeah, absolutely.

Andy Psarianos

You can teach in a way where it's not as good for the boys and a lot worse for the girls, which is what we've traditionally done.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

Yeah, that sums it up really well.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. Yeah. It's important to understand that because the countries that do well, the gap is not... The higher the numbers become, the less significant the gap is. You know what I mean? If the numbers are really low, if you have a gap of 10, that 10 represents a lot more than it does if the numbers are really, really high.

These numbers are tricky to interpret, these PISA results. Also, we're looking here at mean scores, which doesn't tell the whole story what I'm saying right now. They're mean scores. There's more to the story. There's all kinds of things you need to consider. Like, is everybody grouped together around that number? Or is there you got some real outliers on both ends.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

What we've got that... I think because in England, maths isn't compulsory beyond the age of 16 because our girls don't feel as good about maths, they then don't take maths to 18. So we've got a big gender discrepancy at that point. Those are life opportunities that our girls are losing out on because they don't have a math A Level.

Andy Psarianos

So there's two things to unpick there that I think are really important. If you want to look at the data and look at the facts is how long do people spend in school? What effect does that have on outcomes?

Again, you got to go back to Eric Hanushek here who's done the most research on it. Effectively, Eric Hanushek has really clearly pointed out, it doesn't matter how long you spend in school as far as end results go. What's important is how effective the time you spent at school was.

A lot of countries force their pupils to stay and study mathematics for a long time, but they do a poor job of it. So there's really no point. Versus in other countries where they spend less mandated time learning mathematics, but they do it so well that they actually do really well.

Now, here's the interesting things. In those countries, more pupils will choose to do higher level mathematics, including girls because they think it's an easy subject. So they take maths in university because they think it's an easy way to get an A. Now, just think about that for a minute.

So countries like South Korea and Singapore, lots of pupils choose to take maths or they even take additional mathematics, study things like at more advanced levels of calculus and statistics and stuff in secondary school because they think it's easy. It's an easy way to get... Someone maybe over here would choose to take yoga because they think it's an easy course to get a good grade on. That's a reflection of how well they were taught in primary school.

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

Yeah, it is. I would love us to get to that stage where...

Andy Psarianos

Wouldn't it be great?

Louise Hoskyns-Staples

Wouldn't it be fantastic? Yes. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Thank you for joining us on the School the School Podcast.