Education Week offer three takeaways from a report produced by Gallup in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The report is based on a survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults and 2,831 workplace managers about their attitudes toward math and their perspective on the subject’s role in their personal and professional lives.
1) Not all math skills are equally relevant
Most U.S. adults say math skills in general are important for the workforce—61% say they are very important. Another 35% say they are somewhat important. But not all math learning is equally relevant, they contend.
Elementary school math—foundational knowledge and skills—is very important, nearly all survey respondents agree. Nearly 4 in 5 say it was key to success in the real world, beyond K-12 school.
That proportion decreases when asked about higher-level math.
High school math focuses on concepts that respondents say they don’t actually need to know. Of the 16% who say high school math wasn’t important, about 80% say it was more advanced than what they needed in their real life.
The curriculum in U.S. schools has long been “balanced too heavily” toward theory, says Zarek Drozda, the director of Data Science 4 Everyone, a national coalition of education leaders to advance data science education in K-12 schools.
“Students are telling us very clearly that the curriculum is not relevant for their life post-graduation,” Drozda says. He points to a separate, 2023 survey of more than 37,000 students across 150 countries that found more than half of respondents wanted to develop more data skills.
Some states, including Utah, California, Georgia, and Oregon, have incorporated more data science throughout K-12 math standards in recent years.
2) Adults want more financial math; managers want better foundational arithmetic
About 1 in 5 adults say they would have liked to know more about data science, such as how to manage spreadsheets or large amounts of information, in middle or high school. The most sought-after skill was financial math.
The top of the list looked similar when the survey asked workplace managers what math skills they wished their employees had, but there was one significant difference. Forty-one percent of managers say they wished their direct reports had stronger foundational math skills, such as arithmetic. In general, adults don’t think they need more practice here. Only 7% say they wished they had learned more about it.
It’s possible employees think about the skills that could help them in new careers, says Sarah Powell, a professor who studies math education in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
“If they knew more about data science, software, or statistics, they could have different career pathways open up for them,” she says.
But managers likely see accounting errors and foundational calculation errors; they have probably seen how arithmetic skill either helps or causes problems, Powell says.
As technology such as AI advances, schools can’t “abandon” teaching K-8 basics, concludes Drozda.
3) Younger adults are more negative toward math than older adults
The proportion of people who feel positive about math declines steadily with each younger age group. Sixty-one percent of respondents ages 65 and older are mostly interested, excited, and/or happy about the subject. Only about a third of respondents aged 18-24 report exclusively positive feelings about math.
Drozda blames a lack of data literacy instruction, a mismatch between what students learn in classrooms and the competencies they know they will need for the workforce. “Gen Z students experiencing today’s curriculum are not seeing the value,” he says.
Curricular pacing and pedagogical approach might play a role, according to Powell. “It could be due to math instruction in schools that is increasing math anxiety and decreasing math confidence—math instruction that is not ensuring that students have a strong foundation in one skill before moving onto the next thing,” she says. Some math curricula are more inquiry-based, encouraging students to derive multiple solutions. Others favor explicit instruction, which emphasizes modeling and practice.
Years of math practice may come into play to account for the different attitudes, says Powell. “People who are 55+ have been practicing math for 50+ years. First in school, then probably through 30+ years of career or functioning in society. Research shows that when you have higher math performance you also demonstrate higher math confidence.”
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