Educational Researcher

In March 2008, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel final report was released. This report was produced in response to an executive order from President George W. Bush. The report is important because of its subject matter—improving mathematics teaching and learning—its historically significant genesis, and the strong position that the report takes on the primacy of quantitative methods in education research. The author briefly introduces the report and then draws attention to some of the main points in the commentaries offered in this special issue of Educational Researcher. The special issue ends with a rejoinder from the chair and co-chair of the report.

This article considers the analyses and recommendations presented in Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008), especially the chapters addressing teachers and teacher education (chap. 6) and instructional practices (chap. 7). The authors highlight critical recommendations; identify potential gaps in the specification of topics and review of research; and suggest ways to develop a coherent, systematic strategy to enact recommendations that will improve the quality of the teaching force and mathematics instruction. They organize their comments about the Panel’s findings and recommendations around two broad questions: What issues are (and are not) part of the conversation? and What evidence informs (and does not inform) the conversation?

In this response to Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008), the authors argue that the Panel’s assumption that only experimental research studies can produce scientific evidence limits the power of the Panel’s recommendations to improve mathematics teaching and learning. The authors first discuss the theoretical underpinnings, potential contributions, and limitations of experimental studies. Against this background, they focus on three issues that are central to improving mathematics learning and teaching, those of equity, the nature and content of textbooks, and graduate education. In doing so, the authors illustrate the limitations of developing implications for policy and practice by relying exclusively on research conducted using a single methodology.

In Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008), the Panel’s recommendations on curricular content are based on the professional judgment of the Panel members, not on research on learning and teaching algebra. As such, the Panel’s recommendations must be viewed in light of the political and ideological perspectives from which they were made. The recommendations are also examined from the perspective that inattention to meaning is a root problem of mathematics teaching and learning, yet the report does not consider issues of mathematical meaning or their implications for reform.

The National Mathematics Advisory Panel was given the task of reviewing research on the instructional practices that enable students to learn mathematics successfully. The authors argue that in conducting its review, which appears in Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008), the Panel imposed dangerous dichotomies, opposing extreme forms of teaching against one another. Such dichotomies bear little relation to the realities of mathematics classrooms in the United States and belie the research that has been conducted in mathematics education in the past 20 years. In addition, the methodological restrictions imposed by the Panel rendered the field of mathematics education virtually invisible.

This article is a response to Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008) and to one of the task group reports on which it was based, the report of the Task Group on Learning Processes. The author uses Maxwell’s two views of causality—regularity and process—to explore three major issues raised in the report: the nature of what is learned, how learning occurs, and the transfer of learning. She proposes alternative recommendations to those offered by the Panel, by drawing upon the mathematics education literature, which was largely excluded from the reviewed research. Furthermore, by neglecting research grounded in a process view of causality, the report excludes perspectives and findings that would have illuminated what it means to develop conceptual understanding in mathematics—one of three valued outcomes cited by the Panel.

Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008) recommends that National Assessment of Educational Progress and state tests focus on foundations of algebra and include fewer pattern-type algebra items. Greater mathematics expertise is needed in test development to prevent flawed items. The Panel reached the erroneous conclusion that multiple-choice and constructed response items measure the same thing because it relied on studies where the two item types were constrained to be identical. The Panel’s recommendations on standard setting are misleading because it relied on a single simulation study. By focusing only on special education studies, its discussion of formative assessment implies that formative assessment requires formal tools administered and scored frequently and fails to recognize more interactive forms of feedback found in studies from cognitive science.

The authors praise Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008) for focusing on the mathematics within mathematics education. They critique the Panel for (a) constraining its analysis to two traditional school courses, (b) isolating independent factors and undervaluing integrated approaches, and (c) overlooking recent insights on mathematics learning. The authors urge others to seek deeper analysis of “mathematics worth knowing,” to integrate multiple resources into instructional approaches, and to delve more deeply into recent learning research.

Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008) excludes the view of students learning the social practices of mathematical reasoning and the use of mathematics in understanding and modeling situations. The authors argue that by filtering research to only “statistically significant individual effects, significant positive mean effect size, or equivalent consistent positive findings,” the report misrepresents the resources that education research affords for improving mathematics education and education in general. The authors argue that only offering research results of statistical comparisons is inappropriately limited. They recall a strategy developed by the National Academy of Education in which researchers and educators collaborate to strengthen educational practice in local settings and to provide analyses and develop resources intended to support travel of their innovations to other sites.

The author reviews the recommendations in Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008) and agrees that a rebalancing of mathematics education research is timely and necessary, but questions whether randomized trials of small experimental studies and large field studies, without a clearer framing of the needed continuum of studies, can adequately rebalance the portfolio and address the Panel’s “what works” questions. He offers one listing of the possible phases of research required to support high-quality causal inference in mathematics education as a way to foster continued debate about the ease of moving a model of research that works in one domain (drug trials) into the forced service of another intellectual domain (education).

The authors identify six conditions for success for the work of high-level national panels and identify breaches in these conditions in the recent Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008). They question the trustworthiness, validity, and intellectual integrity of its findings and advice to the nation because of (a) an inappropriate composition of Panel expertise and biased selection of literature (Condition 1); (b) failure to appropriately and consistently apply methodological standards (Condition 2); and (c) inconsistencies between the task group and subcommittee reports and the final report (Condition 6). In asking what difference these breaches make, the authors recount recent events suggesting that these breaches have already contributed to degrading the national discussion of curriculum standards for K–12 mathematics education.

Analyzing Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008), the author situates it in evolving U.S. intergovernmental relations about education, ongoing policy discourses, and texts. State and local policy makers exercise considerable discretion on education, even with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Federal policy makers rely on these policy makers and an expanding extrasystem of education providers to implement their proposals. The report’s alignment with some key ideas in current policy discourses may increase the likelihood that some recommendations will get attention, but intergovernmental arrangements, changing political winds, and worsening economic circumstances pose major implementation hurdles.

The authors respond to comments and criticisms made of Foundations for Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (2008). Given the requirements of the president’s executive order, constraints of time, and the need to make recommendations generalizable to national policy, the Panel adopted appropriately high evidentiary standards for its recommendations. The authors also respond to criticisms voiced on Panel findings regarding mathematics curricula, instructional practices, learning processes, teachers and teacher education, and assessment. While scholars should continue to develop promising programs of research, experimental or otherwise, the report offers a solid basis for improving math achievement.