# Mathematics in the news this week

The week of 30 May 2016

# Mathematics Education for the next Decade, September 10-15, 2017

The 13th International Conference of the Mathematics Education for the Future Project in Catania, Sicily September 2015, was attended by 130 people from 22 countries. The next conference will be held NEXT YEAR at Balatonfüred, Balaton lake, Hungary from September 10-15, 2017. The conference title, Mathematics Education for the next Decade, continues our search for innovation in mathematics, science, computing and statistics education. Our thirteen previous conferences since 1999 were renowned for their friendly and productive atmosphere, and attracted many /movers and shakers/ from around the world.

We now call for papers and workshop summaries for presentation at the conference and publication in the printed conference proceedings. For further details and updates please email alan >>at<< cdnalma.poznan.pl

# The international conference on E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences

The international conference on E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences is a two-day academic conference organised by Newcastle University.

The conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with an interest in e-assessment for mathematics and the sciences. It will consist of a mix of presentations of new techniques, and pedagogic research, as well as workshops where you can get hands-on with leading e-assessment software.

The conference website is http://eams.ncl.ac.uk/.

The deadline for talk proposals is next Tuesday, the 31st of May (though that might be extended if we don’t get too many proposals in the next week), and the deadline for delegate registration is the 30th of June.

Thanks,
Christian Lawson-Perfect

# Mathematics in the news this week

France DGSE: Spy service sets school code-breaking challenge

France’s external intelligence service, the DGSE, has sponsored a school competition to find the nation’s most talented young code-breakers.

It is the first time the DGSE has got involved in such a project in schools.

The first round drew in 18,000 pupils, and just 38 competed in the final on Wednesday, won by a Parisian team.

“The main message is mathematics is not about numbers and figures,” [Mark] Saul said. “It’s about figuring things out. Whenever you’re figuring something out, you’re doing something mathematical.”

Rebecca Hanson has opened her agency Authentic Maths to help Primary School Teachers in the UK offering solutions to the difficulties being experienced with the implementation of the Government’s changes to the primary mathematics curriculum.

UK follows Russia’s example to set up specialist sixth form maths colleges:

A key figure in the establishment of specialist maths institutions in the UK was Baroness (Alison) Wolf, a professor at King’s College London. She knew about Russian maths skills because of her work in universities, where maths departments often attract a fair few Russian academics.

Initially, the idea in the UK was for universities to set up a nationwide network of specialist maths schools. However, only King’s College London and Exeter have taken the plunge.

# Why undegraduate students should not use online matrix calculators

Since 1 April 2011 I from time to time was trying to convince Wolfram Alpha to fix a bug in the way they computed eigenvectors, see my post of 28 April 2012. It survived until May 2016:

As you can see, Wolfram Alpha was thinking that the zero vector is eigenvector. On 5 May 2016 this bug was finally fixed:

But there is still one glitch which can send an undergraduate student on a wrong path. The use of round brackets as delimeters for both matrices and vectors suggests that the vector $$(1,0)$$ is treated as a $$1 \times 2$$ matrix, that is a row vector. This determines which way it can be multiplied by a $$2 \times 2$$ matrix: on the right, that way:
$(1,0) \left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 2 \\ 0 & 1\end{array}\right)$
and not that way
$\left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 2 \\ 0 & 1\end{array}\right)(1,0),$
the latter is simply not defined. Therefore the correct answer is not
$\mathbf{v}_1 = (1,0)$
but
$\mathbf{u} = (0,1) \quad\mbox{ or }\quad \mathbf{w} = (1,0)^T = \left(\begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0\end{array}\right),$
depending on convention used for vectors: row vectors or column vectors. Indeed if
$A = \left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 2 \\ 0 & 1\end{array}\right),$
then
$\mathbf{v}_1A = (1,0)\left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 2 \\ 0 & 1\end{array}\right) = (1,2) \ne 1\cdot \mathbf{v}_1,$
while
$A\mathbf{w} = \left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 2 \\ 0 & 1\end{array}\right) \left(\begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0\end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0\end{array}\right) = 1\cdot \mathbf{w}$
and
$\mathbf{u} A = (0,1) \left(\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 2 \\ 0 & 1\end{array}\right) = (0,1) = 1\cdot \textbf{u}.$
The bug is likely to sit somewhere in the module which converts matrices and vectors from their internal representation within the computational engine into the format for graphics output. It should be very easy to fix. It is not an issue of computer programming, it is just lack of attention to basic principle of exposition of mathematics and didactics of mathematics education.

# Alexandre Borovik: Decoupling of Assessment

Thousands of parents in England plan to keep their children off school for a day next week in protest at tough new national tests, campaigners say.

Parents from the Let Our Kids Be Kids campaign said children as young as six were labelling themselves failures.

In a letter to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, they said primary pupils were being asked to learn concepts that may be beyond their capability.

The government said the tests should not cause pupils stress.

These new tests, known as Sats, have been drawn up to assess children’s grasp of the recently introduced primary school national curriculum, which is widely considered to be harder than the previous one.

The letter from the campaign, which says it represents parents of six- and seven-year-olds across the country, says children are crying about going to school.

There is a simple solution – decoupling of assessment of schools from assessment of individual children.

As far I remember my school years back in Soviet Russia of 1960s, schools there were assessed by regular (but not frequent) “ministerial tests”. A school received, without warning, a test paper in a sealed envelope which could be open only immediately before the test; pupils’ test scripts were collected, put into an enclosed envelope, sealed and sent back. Tests were marked in the local education authority (and on some occasions even a step up in the administrative hierarchy — in the regional education authority); marked test scripts, however, were not returned to schools, and schools received only summary feedback — but no information about performance of individual students.

This policy of anonymised summary tests created a psychological environment of trust between pupils and the teacher — children knew that it was not them who were assessed, but their teacher and their school, and they tried hard to help their teacher. Good teachers could build on this trust a supportive working environment in a classroom.  Schools and teachers who performed well in such anonymised testing could be trusted to assess pupils in a formative, non-intrusive, non-intimidating way — and without individual high stakes testing.

Of course, all that are my memories from another historic epoch and from the country that no longer exists. I could be mistaken in details, but I am quite confident about the essence. In this country and in recent years, I happened to take part in a few meetings in the Department for Education, where I raised this issue. Education experts present at these meetings liked the idea but it was not followed by any discussion since it was outside of meetings’ agenda — we had to focus on the  content of the new curriculum, not assessment. I would love to see a proper public discussion of feasibility of decoupling.

I teach mathematics at a university. I think I am not alone (I heard similar concerns from my colleagues from Universities from all over the country) in feeling that many our students come to university with a deformed attitude to assessment — for example, with subconscious desire to forget everything as soon as they have sat an exam. It could happen that some of them, in their school years, suffered from overexamination but were not receiving  sufficient formative feedback. At university, such students do not know how to use teachers’ feedback. They do not know how to ask questions. Could it happen that the roots of the problem could be traced back to junior school?

Disclaimer. The views expressed do not necessarily represent the position of my employer or any other person, organisation, or institution.

Alexandre Borovik