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Girls in New York City outperformed boys on the state's standardized math tests this year, widening the gap between the genders when it comes to math, new statistics show. More than 35 percent of the city's third-through-eighth-grade girls passed the state math test, up from 30 percent last year which was the first year of the harder tests aligned to federal Common Core standards. For boys, 33.4 percent passed this year's test, up from last year's 29.3 percent. It's too soon to know why girls' math scores are rising faster than boys', but some experts wonder if all of the...

A brief introduction to password hashing for the uninitiated -- and why you should never trust a site that emails your password back to you!

As U.S. high schools beef up math and science requirements for graduation, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that more rigorous academics drive some students to drop out. The research team reported in the June/July issue of the journal Educational Researcher that policies increasing the number of required high school math and science courses are linked to higher dropout rates. "There's been a movement to make education in the United States compare more favorably to education in the rest of the world, and part of that has involved increasing math and science graduation requirements," explained first author...

Big name Republicans giving their full-throated support to the Obama Administration’s Common Core education reforms don’t dwell too much on what they are. They don’t look good in close-up. Common Core State Standards “Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in math were developed to address the criticism that national math curriculums were ‘a mile wide and an inch deep,’” Sarah Perry writes in a Family Research Council (FRC) issue brief. “The drafters sought to develop more focus and coherence through the standards, with the belief that those students who can explain mathematical rules would have a better chance at succeeding in...

A relic from long before the age of supercomputers, the 169-year-old math strategy called the Jacobi iterative method is widely dismissed today as too slow to be useful. But thanks to a curious, numbers-savvy Johns Hopkins engineering student and his professor, it may soon get a new lease on life. With just a few modern-day tweaks, the researchers say they've made the rarely used Jacobi method work up to 200 times faster. The result, they say, could speed up the performance of computer simulations used in aerospace design, shipbuilding, weather and climate modeling, biomechanics and other engineering tasks. Their paper...

GREENWELL SPRINGS, La. — Rebekah and Kevin Nelams moved to their modest brick home in this suburb of Baton Rouge seven years ago because it has one of the top-performing public school districts in the state. But starting this fall, Ms. Nelams plans to home-school the couple’s four elementary-age children. The main reason: the methods that are being used for teaching math under the Common Core, a set of academic standards adopted by more than 40 states. Ms. Nelams said she did not recognize the approaches her children, ages 7 to 10, were being asked to use on math work...

This math question from an admissions test for an elementary school in Hong Kong is going viral in China.According to ChinaSmack, it was the second-most-popular post on Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo on June 5, when it was published.The question was part of an admissions test for first-graders. They had 20 seconds to answer. Can you solve it? via ChinaSmack Stumped? Scroll down for the answer.

Common Core is on the chopping block. Oklahoma today became the third state to exit the national education standards and reclaim its decision-making authority in education. The move comes on the heels of South Carolina, which days ago put an end to Common Core—setting precedent for other states to follow. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley quietly signed a bill withdrawing the state from Common Core, but Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, also a Republican, was not shy about stating her reasons for pulling her state from the national standards. “We are capable of developing our own Oklahoma academic standards that will...

At the start of morning assembly in the state-of-the-art Viikki School here, students’ smartphones disappear. In math class, the teacher shuts off the Smartboard and begins drafting perfect circles on a chalkboard. The students — some of the highest-achieving in the world — cut up graphing paper while solving equations using their clunky plastic calculators. Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there. That’s in stark...

The question of how to win at Rock-Paper-Scissors has, believe it or not, plagued mathematicians and game theorists for quite some time. While they previously had devised a theoretical answer to the question, a new experiment by Zhijian Wang at Zhejiang University in China that used real players, has revealed an interesting wrinkle to the original theory. In the experiment, Zhijian noticed that winning players tended to stick with their winning strategy, while losers tended to switch to the next strategy in the sequence of rock-paper-scissors, following, what he calls, “persistent cyclic flows.” Here's how it works in practice: Player...

When you look back at New Math (ca. 1965) and Reform Math (ca. 1990), one of the most striking and persistent features was that parents could not understand the homework which their children brought home. Mystified parents were trying to advise mystified children. The parents, presumably the wise members of the society, were helpless to say anything useful when confronted by the weird complexities of “reform” math, which has now been rolled forward into Common Core. Here is a commonplace horror story that can stand in for millions of others: “When Mike and Camille Chudzinski tried to help their son...

If the Common Core education reforms introduced by President Obama and supported by big-name Republicans were subject to peer review, they might become a “whatever became of?” question. “Take, for example, my first-grade son’s Common Core math lesson in basic subtraction,” David G. Bonagura, Jr., writes in an article which appeared in The Education Reporter. “Six- and seven-year-olds do not yet possess the ability to think abstractly; their mathematics instruction, therefore, must employ concrete methodologies, explanations, and examples.” “But rather than, say, count on a number line or use objects, Common Core’s standards mandate teaching first-graders to ‘decompose’ two-digit numbers...

Don't laugh at us old folk. Our data bases are full, so we can't retain what we don't use like we once could. My friend and I need some help from some of you mathematically inclined FReepers. Problem: Mike's sales goal last year was $90,071. His employer increased it to $124,111 this year. What percentage of increase is this, and how did you arrive at the answer? Thanking y'all in advance. :)

Check out this video and feel your head spin like Linda Blair as you watch the teacher go into a very, very complicated and convoluted method (algorithm?) to solve the very, very simple subtraction problem 32 – 12 = 20. Source.

The litany of frighteningly stupid Common Core math worksheets never ends. Perhaps now, though, kids are starting to fight back in satisfyingly creative ways. An alert reader sent The Daily Caller this image of her seven-year-old son’s perfectly reasonable homework answer. The boy attends a public elementary school in San Jose, Calif. He is in the second grade. The math curriculum used by the school is GO Math! The publisher of GO Math! is produced by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The parent who sent the homework question to TheDC noted that the curriculum aligns with the Common Core math standards. “If...

My recent post (my other car is a cdr) brought forth the best of the high-functioning geeks that inhabit this here space. Since the thread veered off (as they always tend to do) into general computer language humor, mostly dealing with Lisp, I got to thinking about RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) and the Hewlett-Packard calculators that were popular in my post-college days working in IT around 1971 or so.Are there other FReepers that still like RPN over infix notation for math? My trusty old H-P has long since departed (wish I still had it) but I've found RpCalc to be...

We don't need to know anything else about this kid to know they're a good one...

College students and others at George Mason University were dumbstruck by the tedious nature of an elementary level Common Core problem during a short series of interviews conducted by Campus Reform last week. The problem, 32-12, was demonstrated to those on campus the traditional way and juxtaposed with the Common Core method.

Nevada education officials are making it easier for students to pass a math proficiency test that's required for graduation but has proved tough for high schoolers. State board of education officials announced Wednesday that they would implement a pass score of 242 on the 500-point math portion of the high school proficiency exam.

Here is the latest in a long line of frighteningly stupid Common Core math worksheets to bubble up courtesy of Twitter, according to Twitchy.