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The OECD is out with new global rankings of how students in various countries do in reading , science and math .

It's a not-so rosy report card for the nation's schoolchildren. Math scores slipped for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years, and reading grades were not much better, flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to the 2015 Nation's Report Card. ... Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, teachers, and others not to panic about the scores as states embrace higher academic standards, such as Common Core.

A new trend in math at elementary schools around the country has parents pulling out their hair. Mainly because it is the opposite of how most of today's adults were taught to do simple multiplication in the first place. According to a Common Core math worksheet that's gone viral, an elementary child today cannot just say, "5 x 3 = 15." Instead they have to change the multiplication problem to addition before solving the equation. However, if the child says, "5 + 5 + 5 = 15," they will still lose points because the problem must be written as it...

Here's a "repeated addition" Common Core problem that's taught in third grade in US schools: Use the repeated-addition strategy to solve: 5x3 If you answer the question with "5+5+5=15,” you would be wrong. The correct answer is "3+3+3+3+3.” Mathematically, both are correct. But under Common Core, you're supposed to read "5x3" as "five groups of three." So "three groups of five" is wrong. According to Common Core defenders, this method will be useful when students do more advanced math. This way of reading things, for instance, can be used when students learn matrices in multivariable calculus in high school. But...

California Sen. Holly Mitchell (D) connects the lack of racial diversity in Silicon Valley with racially motivated “math misplacement.”She claims middle-school algebra teachers are holding back black and Latino kids from advancing to ninth-grade geometry, even though they are doing just as well as white kids who are getting a grade of “B” or better, and are meeting or exceeding state standard assessments.However, the study that Mitchell and others supporting her effort cite as proof of their position also shows the real problem is actually with middle-school algebra teachers. Many of them just aren’t very good at their jobs.The...

Washington - There has been an astounding 32 per cent increase this year in the number of students flocking to American universities for higher studies. It is the biggest increase from any single country for the year, although in overall terms, China still tops the table in a big way. Figures just released by the US Student and Exchange Visitor Programme (SEVP) indicate that 149,987 Indian students are currently enrolled in American universities of a total of 1.05 million. Chinese students number 301,532. When it comes to the highly-coveted STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) stream, it is Indian students...

What Is the Math of Spiritual Goods and Why Is The World Such a Deadly Place Without It? Msgr. Charles Pope • August 10, 2015 • In an increasingly materialistic and secular world, a deadly math has set up. It is deadly because it has rejected the spiritual math of God and of spiritual goods.What is meant by “spiritual math”? It is a math that recalls that spiritual goods, in themselves, do not admit of division and subtraction, but only of multiplication and addition. Rather than diminishing, spiritual goods grow when shared. And this is a critical math never to...

The New York State Education Department released a sampling of questions from statewide math and reading tests this week, showing the kind of problems elementary- and middle-school students have to grapple with. As The New York Times notes, New York is generally considered to have some of the hardest tests in the country. Only 36% of students passed the math exams in 2014; reading scores were even lower. Along with some of the questions that appeared on each test, NYSED included the percentage of students statewide who answered the question correctly. Scores of individual schools will be released later this...

In a recent ABC News article, journalist David Knight writes that two German scientists have proven logician and mathematician, Kurt Gödel’s, theorem for God’s existence is logically accurate [1]. Knight writes, “The details of the mathematics involved in Gödel's ontological proof are complicated, but in essence the Austrian was arguing that, by definition, God is that for which no greater can be conceived. And while God exists in the understanding of the concept, we could conceive of him as greater if he existed in reality. Therefore, he must exist. “Even at the time, the argument was not exactly a new...

This math exercise will only take you about ten seconds. Amazingly, it really works and will reveal your all-time favorite movie. Mine was spot on! DO NOT cheat. DO YOUR math, THEN compare the results to the list of movies at the bottom You will be AMAZED at how scary true and accurate this test is. 1. Pick a number from 1-9. 2. Multiply that number by 3. 3. Add 3. 4. Multiply by 3 again. 5. Your total will be a two digit number. Add the first and second digits together to find your favorite movie (of all time)...

A Mathematician's View of Evolution Granville Sewell July 23, 2015 3:59 AM | Permalink Editor's note: Chapter 2 in Dr. Sewell's new book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design (2nd edition) originated as an Opinion piece published in 2000 in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 22, number 4, pp. 5-7 (used with permission from Springer). We present the accepted manuscript below; the final publication is available here. In 1996, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe published a book entitled Darwin's Black Box (Free Press), whose central theme is that every living cell is loaded with features and biochemical processes...

In one of this year's most intense international competitions, the United States has come out as best in the world — and this time, we're not talking about soccer. This week, the top-ranked math students from high schools around the country went head-to-head with competitors from more than 100 countries at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Chiang Mai, Thailand. And, for the first time in more than two decades, they won. Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head coach for Team USA, says the competition is held over the course of two days. Students work on three...

John Urschel plays football for the Baltimore Ravens. He's also a published mathematician. How does he stack up against the average millennial?

In recent months, Christopher Scalia in the Wall Street Journal and Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post have defended studying the liberal arts in college, primarily to confront advocates of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Zakaria’s article previewed his new book, “In Defense of a Liberal Education.” From my perspective as a former engineer, two caveats arise regarding their pleas: first, “liberal” education that involves “critical thinking” disappeared decades ago, to be replaced by hyper-sensitive grievance mongering; second, the quantitative reasoning STEM occupations develops also facilitates the understanding of trade-offs people need to make rational decisions among myriad conflicting...

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematical genius who had his life chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind. One of Nash’s colleagues says that just days before he died in a New York taxi cab accident, he had discussed his latest and possibly most brilliant discovery to date. Mathematician Cédric Villan says that Nash told him that he had replaced Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and that the new equation would further explain quantum gravity. The Daily Mail reports that on May 20, 2015, just three days before the tax cab accident that would take his life, Nash spoke to...

Singapore is the smartest country in the world, followed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, Netherlands and Canada rounding out the top 10. The BBC says this is the conclusion of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an economic think tank that outlined its findings in a new report ranking countries' school systems based on students math and science test scores. The report – which the BBC received early access to – will be formally presented at the World Education Forum in South Korea next week. Of the 76 countries ranked, the top half...

I'm trying to figure something out for work, but my math skills are not very good. How do I calculate percentages if an event reoccurs multiple times? Suppose there is an event that has the chance of occurring on in 6 times (like rolling a dice and getting a "five"). What are the chances I will get a "five" if I roll the dice six times?

TORONTO, April 24, 2015 -- A lesbian teacher ‘married’ to another woman revealed at a pro-gay teachers’ conference earlier this month how she teaches grade 4-5 students to accept homosexuality through what she called “social justice” math. Alicia Gunn, an elementary public school teacher in Mississauga, Ontario, told attendees at the April 10 conference in Toronto’s City Hall that injecting LGBTQ issues into the classroom, especially in math, helps students as young as nine “disrupt the single story that many of our kids have about LGBTQ families.” When asked by one of the workshop attendees if she first asks parents’...

One word problem from a Singaporean school exam briefly became the talk of the Internet last weekend....[Snip]... The puzzle went viral across the country, with people ranging from perplexed adults to eager teenagers grappling with the simple question: "So when is Cheryl's birthday?"

John Urschel is an offensive lineman for the NFL Baltimore Ravens whose Twitter handle is @MathMeetsFball. He has bachelor's and master's degrees in math, both with a 4.0 grade-point average. ... We should note, this isn't Urschel's first published math paper. He's also an avid chess player and hopes to be titled.