Month: August 2023

Australian teenagers have more disruptive maths classrooms and experience bullying at greater levels than the OECD average, a new report shows.

But in better news, Australian students report high levels of curiosity, which is important for both enjoyment and achievement at school.

The report, by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) analysed questionnaire responses from more than 13,430 Australian students and 743 principals, to understand how their school experiences impact on maths performance.

What is the research?

This is the second report exploring Australian data from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Australian teenagers have more disruptive maths classrooms and experience bullying at greater levels than the OECD average, a new report shows.

But in better news, Australian students report high levels of curiosity, which is important for both enjoyment and achievement at school.

The report, by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) analysed questionnaire responses from more than 13,430 Australian students and 743 principals, to understand how their school experiences impact on maths performance.

What is the research?

This is the second report exploring Australian data from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Author provided (no reuse)

The advantage gap

ACER’s first PISA 2022 report showed students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds were six times more likely to be low performers in maths than advantaged students.

It also showed the achievement gap between these two groups had grown by 19 points (or about one year of learning) since 2018.

This second report provides more insight into the challenges faced by disadvantaged students.

It shows a greater proportion of this group report learning in a less favourable disciplinary climate, experience lower levels of teacher support and feel less safe at school than their more advantaged peers.

Girls are more worried than boys

In last year’s report, the mean score for maths performance across OECD countries was nine points lower for girls than it was for boys. In Australia, the difference was 12 points.

The new report also showed differences in wellbeing. In 2022, a greater number of girls reported they panicked easily (58% compared to 23% of boys), got nervous easily (71% compared to 39%) and felt nervous about approaching exams (75% compared 49%).

Almost double the percentage of girls reported feeling anxious when they didn’t have their “digital device” near them (20% compared to 11%). Whether this was a phone, tablet or computer was not specified.

Overall, students who reported feeling anxious when they did not have their device near them scored 37 points lower on the maths test than those who reported never feeling this way or feeling it “half the time”.

Author provided (no reuse)

Curiosity a strong marker for performance

Curiosity was measured for the first time in PISA 2022. This included student behaviours such as asking questions, developing hypotheses, knowing how things work, learning new things and boredom.

Students in Singapore, the highest performing country in PISA 2022, showed the greatest levels of curiosity, followed by Korea and Canada. These were the only comparison countries to have a significantly higher curiosity score than Australia, with the Netherlands showing the lowest curiosity score overall.

As ACER researchers note: “curiosity is associated with greater psychological wellbeing” and “leads to more enjoyment and participation in school and higher academic achievement”.

They found Australia’s foreign-born students reported being more curious than Australian-born students, with 74% compared to 66% reporting that they liked learning new things.

What next?

Their findings highlight concerns for Australian education, such as persistently poor outcomes for disadvantaged students and higher stress levels experienced by girls. We need to better understand why this is happening.

But they also identify behaviours and conditions – such as high levels of curiosity – that contribute to a good maths performance and can be used by schools and policymakers to plan for better outcomes.

For more such insights, log into our website https://international-maths-challenge.com

Credit of the article given to The Conversation

Luis Caffarelli has been awarded the most prestigious prize in mathematics for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations, which have many applications in the real world.

Luis Caffarelli has won the 2023 Abel prize, unofficially called the Nobel prize for mathematics, for his work on a class of equations that describe many real-world physical systems, from melting ice to jet engines.

Caffarelli was having breakfast with his wife when he found out the news. “The breakfast was better all of a sudden,” he says. “My wife was happy, I was happy — it was an emotional moment.”

Based at the University of Texas at Austin, Caffarelli started work on partial differential equations (PDEs) in the late 1970s and has contributed to hundreds of papers since. He is known for making connections between seemingly distant mathematical concepts, such as how a theory describing the smallest possible areas that surfaces can occupy can be used to describe PDEs in extreme cases.

PDEs have been studied for hundreds of years and describe almost every sort of physical process, ranging from fluids to combustion engines to financial models. Caffarelli’s most important work concerned nonlinear PDEs, which describe complex relationships between several variables. These equations are more difficult to solve than other PDEs, and often produce solutions that don’t make sense in the physical world.

Caffarelli helped tackle these problems with regularity theory, which sets out how to deal with problematic solutions by borrowing ideas from geometry. His approach carefully elucidated the troublesome parts of the equations, solving a wide range of problems over his more than four-decade career.

“Forty years after these papers appeared, we have digested them and we know how to do some of these things more efficiently,” says Francesco Maggi at the University of Texas at Austin. “But when they appeared back in the day, in the 80s, these were alien mathematics.”

Many of the nonlinear PDEs that Caffarelli helped describe were so-called free boundary problems, which describe physical scenarios where two objects in contact share a changing surface, like ice melting into water or water seeping through a filter.

“He has used insights that combined ingenuity, and sometimes methods that are not ultra-complicated, but which are used in a manner that others could not see — and he has done that time and time again,” says Thomas Chen at the University of Texas at Austin.

These insights have also helped other researchers translate equations so that they can be solved on supercomputers. “He has been one of the most prominent people in bringing this theory to a point where it’s really useful for applications,” says Maggi.

For more such insights, log into www.international-maths-challenge.com.

*Credit for article given to Alex Wilkins*