Expanding High School Math for a Data-Driven World
Marley Arechiga in Conversation With Amy Getz, Senior Program Associate of Mathematics Education at WestEd
Amy Getz:
We are inundated with information about whether it’s politics, social issues, economic issues, and people are always presenting data to us. We need to be able to understand that, make sense of it, be critical thinkers of it. We need to be able to make good financial decisions, good health decisions. All of those things require skills that go beyond anything you’d ever learn in calculus.
Marley Arechiga:
Welcome to Leading Voices, the podcast where WestEd experts break down pressing challenges and education and human development and provide insights you can apply to practice and policy. I’m Marley Arechiga.
For generations, high school math has generally focused on the same topics: algebra, geometry, calculus, and maybe trigonometry. But in the world that students are entering today, more decisions are being made with data, whether we’re checking our fitness trackers or trying to separate fact from fiction online. That means skills like data literacy, statistical analysis, and quantitative reasoning are becoming more important, not just in college and career, but in everyday life. So what does that mean for high school math?
Today’s guest explores how changes in higher education and our increasingly data-driven world are reshaping the kind of math students need to learn and why high schools may want to offer new advanced math courses to keep pace. Amy Getz is a senior program associate with WestEd’s mathematics education team. She’s an expert in post-secondary math reform and the transition from high school to college math. Thank you for joining us, Amy.
Amy Getz:
Thank you, Marley.
Marley Arechiga:
When you look at how students move through high school math as it is now, what’s the current pathway doing well?
Amy Getz:
I’m really glad you started with that question because I think it’s very important that we don’t feed into this false narrative that everything in math education is broken. That is not true. There are many things that are working really well. And the current pathways in high school mathematics have created opportunities for students to take more advanced courses than they have in the past. And for the students that have those opportunities and for whom that’s a good fit, that is really great.
The other thing that is a wonderful opportunity that is growing more and more is students taking dual enrollment math, which allows them to earn college credit while in high school. And there are many, many people and many schools out there working very hard to expand the access to those opportunities so that more students get to take advantage of them.
Marley Arechiga:
You’ve highlighted some strengths, but where do you see the biggest disconnect between high school math and college and career expectations?
Amy Getz:
So one of the big problems is the lack of advanced, rigorous math courses that expose students to a variety of mathematical and statistical topics that are used and very necessary in all sorts of careers now, not to mention just living in this data-driven society. And when I say advanced courses, I mean courses that would typically be taken in the third or fourth year of high school. They would typically follow algebra two or in some cases be taken as an alternative to algebra two.
Marley Arechiga:
Can you describe the kind of advanced courses you’re proposing that are maybe more relevant to students’ lives after high school?
Amy Getz:
So the types of mathematics that can be more relevant now include things like quantitative reasoning, statistics, data literacy. Some schools are doing data science courses. Some schools do have quantitative reasoning courses as an option. And then statistics is sometimes offered either as an AP course or as a regular high school course.
Marley Arechiga:
What kind of problems would students encounter in this type of course?
Amy Getz:
So first of all, in general, these kinds of topics are going to be taught in a much more open-ended context where there isn’t just a set of steps that you go through and then you get the right answer. Let’s say a common problem in my area is that we’re in the middle of a drought and we do not have enough water. And there’s a need to be able to figure out, well, what do we have to do in order to survive in this environment? And so that is looking at what resources do we have? How much water is there? How much water do we think we will be able to expect, which is a modeling problem. So that’s a real world issue people are working on right now. So it’s relevant to students. It draws on skills that they would have to decide what information do we need to even solve these questions? Instead of just being presented with a problem where it says solve for X, they have to figure out how do you even begin to explore that problem?
Marley Arechiga:
What can these courses provide for students that the current pathway can’t?
Amy Getz:
So one of the things we hear the most from even the STEM fields, the sciences, is that students don’t know how to look at a problem they’ve never seen before and draw upon their mathematics to decide how to approach that problem. And I think that is definitely related to the ways in which we traditionally teach math. And again, this could be students who take calculus, but just that ability to apply their learning to new situations, that’s a real problem for all sorts of people with all sorts of different mathematical preparation.
They can be very intimidated by something that just doesn’t look like the math that they’ve seen before and not understanding that actually they do have the tools to solve something. I think that if someone is only getting an algebra, kind of that strict algebra foundation, they are going to be less prepared to make sense of data. And especially data that is presented in ways that may be biased or incomplete. They’re less prepared to ask the critical questions that might help them make the sense of that data and look at it and make decisions based on data.
Marley Arechiga:
It seems like colleges have already caught onto that. They’ve made more math options available to students to better prepare them for interpreting data in the real world. Could you walk us through what’s changed in college math that’s maybe driving a need for these kinds of courses at the high school level?
Amy Getz:
So I started working at the national level on math pathways in 2011. And since then we have had really dramatic shifts in higher education in the mathematics options that students have. Traditionally, college algebra was considered the gateway math course for our post-secondary. And by “gateway,” I mean that it is the first math course that would actually apply to a degree, either for general education credit or to an actual program. And in the past, the vast majority of students in college were going into college algebra. Some colleges did offer a quantitative reasoning course, but it was a very small percentage typically, and many colleges didn’t offer other options at all.
And now we just did a survey a couple years ago of 125 two and four-year colleges across 21 states. And it was a sampling of colleges of all types of different sizes, locations, urban, rural. And we looked at tribal colleges and HBCUs. And so colleges of every classification, all public, we didn’t look at private institutions. And every single one of them offered at least two gateway math courses and most of them had three. And those are typically, we still have college algebra and there are still a lot of students going into college algebra, but most colleges are offering a quantitative reasoning course. And statistics is also increasingly being used as a gateway course.
So a student going into college is going to have these different options and they need to be able to choose those options based on their own goals, their own aspirations for what kind of degree they want or certificate or what kind of career they’re looking at. So having that experience in high school of being able to have different courses that are better aligned with those options in college will help them both understand what they want to do and help them prepare for the actual courses.
Marley Arechiga:
Why have colleges added these kinds of gateway math courses?
Amy Getz:
The kinds of skills that students need in order to go on into careers today are totally different. There are dramatically different needs, not even in just the jobs we have, but just in our everyday lives of the kinds of decisions we have to make. We have to be able to interpret data. We are inundated with information about whether it’s politics, social issues, economic issues, and people are always presenting data to us. We need to be able to understand that, make sense of it, be critical thinkers of it. We need to be able to make good financial decisions, good health decisions. All of those things require skills that go beyond anything you’d ever learn in calculus.
Marley Arechiga:
Given the changes you’ve described in college math and just in the real world in general, what do you think needs to change at the high school level to better prepare students?
Amy Getz:
Well, there already has been a movement to integrate more statistics and data literacy and quantitative reasoning into our curriculum. So I don’t want to say that we haven’t done any work on that, but we need to continue that. That goes all the way back through all of our K-12 mathematics should be integrated with these concepts. Then offering advanced courses that really dig into developing those skills is an important part of that. Part of what we also need to do is accept that technology is changing how we engage with mathematics and statistics in the world. And we have to think about what can technology do better and what can human beings do better?
And technology does computation really well. It does rote processes really well. But human beings do that…the framing and understanding complex open-ended problems like we mentioned before. Human beings bring something to mathematics and to these processes that technology can’t. And so understanding what those things are and understanding how to develop those skills has got to be a major part of how we are thinking about our education in the future.
And it’s also not just about content. It’s also about the structures and policies that determine who actually gets access to challenging math education, because that’s part of our problem now. There are some great options out there, but there are very few students who actually get access to that. And also thinking about how that content is learned and making sure that every single student out there has the opportunity to learn rigorous mathematics that they will find empowering and help propel them to their future learning.
Marley Arechiga:
What do you think we risk for students if we don’t provide them with these kinds of advanced courses?
Amy Getz:
I think we risk a further divide in terms of the skill sets that people have that help navigate our world, give them career opportunities. We already see that we have that divide in terms of who takes advanced math and who doesn’t. And that’s just going to get worse and worse.
Marley Arechiga:
I wonder how AI is shaping your thinking about this issue. Has it made it more urgent for you in any way?
Amy Getz:
Yeah. If we stick to this idea that we can just continue to teach mathematics in the same way that we’ve taught it for decades and that that will serve our students well, we are really failing them. So I think it’s so important that we empower students to see themselves as mathematical learners, to know that they can jump into something that maybe doesn’t look familiar, that they can figure out where to get information and how to make sense of that information. Those are the skills that they’re going to need in the future because I just can’t imagine that anybody in five years even will be doing things the exact same way we’re doing them today in any field, whether it’s math or something else, because I mean, we just can see how dramatically AI is changing the way we operate in our world.
Marley Arechiga:
Yeah, definitely. All right, Amy, with our time winding down, if district leaders want to start the process of offering these advanced math courses, where should they start?
Amy Getz:
So first of all, they do need to understand their state policy. That kind of defines the boundaries of the sandbox in which they get to play. So that’s the starting point. But then there are a number of options out there, a number of places to get information. So at WestEd, we are actually in the midst of a project in partnership with the Charles A. Dana Center from the University of Texas at Austin. And we are developing an integrated statistics and quantitative reasoning course.
And this is actually going to solve one of those problems we talked about with a lack of curriculum because it will be made available as an open education resource in 2027. We’ll be piloting in this coming year. And it is a course that’s been developed with a lot of input from teachers and students. So we hope that it addresses some of the challenges we’ve talked about, not just having really rigorous mathematics and statistics, but presenting it in a way that teachers find exciting, that students find exciting, that challenge them and help them develop different skills.
And then Data Science for Everyone is an organization that promotes data science, obviously, from the name. And it has resources for teachers. And it also has, they do a lot of work around policy. So there’s some good things in there for anybody who’s looking at trying to expand their state policies. And of course, our professional associations are important resources for us. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics.
Another great place to look is an organization called Skew the Script, which has on their website, they have a lot of great resources around statistics and also algebra one and algebra two, but the resources that would help expand the ways that data and quantitative reasoning would be used in those courses. So those organizations provide a lot of resources and they have been leaders in promoting the expansion of thinking about different mathematic topics. So that’s where I would start if I were looking for information.
Marley Arechiga:
Amy, we’ll end on that note. Where can listeners get in touch with you?
Amy Getz:
You can contact me at agetz, [email protected].
Marley Arechiga:
And where can listeners learn more about the integrated statistics and quantitative reasoning course your team is piloting with the Dana Center?
Amy Getz:
You can sign up for updates in the link that will be in the show notes, or you can send an email to [email protected]. There’s also an ISQR webpage that will be included in the show notes.
Marley Arechiga:
Sounds good, Amy. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Amy Getz:
Thank you.
Marley Arechiga:
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This podcast was brought to you by WestEd. WestEd is a nonpartisan research development and service agency. We work to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Special thanks to our audio producer, Sanjay Pardanani, and to Gretchen Wright for her editorial support. Thanks so much for tuning in. Until next time.