The Abacus maths textbook, which has been causing ‘maths anxiety’ in children in government and private schools, will be discontinued after 2016, sources close to the Education Ministry said.

Maltese children aged eight to 11 are finding themselves at a loss trying to work out simple maths problems using complex linear methods rather than the formal ways.

Josef Lauri, University of Malta mathematician, told Times of Malta recently that the Abacus textbook, introduced by the Education Department 10 years ago, has been “a failure and should be scrapped”.

Parents and teachers reacted favourably to this, citing innumerable problems that students have been facing using this method.

Parents felt reassured that they were not the only ones finding difficulties

Sources close to the Education Ministry said this coming scholastic year will be the last one where government schools will have Abacus as a text book.

For the scholastic year 2016/2017 students will be following a different textbook.

Prof. Lauri said: “Parents felt reassured that they were not the only ones finding difficulties and that they were right in teaching children their old method.” And teachers, he said, were mostly relieved that someone had voiced their very own concern.

“Because even though teachers are told that they can use whichever system they like, it does not really work that way: teachers follow the material they have at their disposal.”

‘Children need to be told the best way’

The Malta Union of Teachers has said that children who are not mathematical whizzes “struggle to grasp” the Abacus method. MUT president Kevin Bonello said students should be allowed to use whichever method they feel most comfortable with rather than being restricted to Abacus.

However Prof. Lauri is not in favour of allowing children to choose their own method. He gave the example of a child who is told to choose an outfit from a huge wardrobe: “If the child has a bit of fashion sense it will be fine, but for children who don’t – it will panic them.”

He feels that behind Abacus there is a philosophy that discourages guiding children and advocates leaving them to discover their own way.

“But what if the method is not efficient? You cannot let an eight-year-old child divide 124 by 6, by making 124 notches and strike them off in groups of six. That would be going back to the time before we had the place value system of the tens, hundreds, thousands,” he said.

Children need to be told which way is better. “They need a method which in the beginning will take a bit of an effort to reason out, but then you start doing it without thinking,” he said.

However, a spokesman for the Directorate for Quality and Standards in Education within the Education Ministry said that children should be “given the opportunity” to come up with different ways of adding and subtracting. “No child is expected to learn by heart all the strategies outlined in any textbook.”

The Abacus textbook, he said, is just “one tool” to help with the implementation of the syllabus and no single textbook or scheme can ever be the only resource used in class for “a quality mathematics education”.

“The Primary Mathematics Syllabus, which has been revised and came into effect as from this scholastic year, takes into account these differences among children. The revised syllabus emphasises that procedures should never be learned in the absence of a concept,” the spokesman said.

Despite the change in approach, he said, knowing the times-tables by heart is still considered to be an important learning outcome in the Primary Mathematics syllabus.

Moreover, teachers undergo continuous training and the Directorate of Curriculum Management provides parents with the opportunity to participate in in-class sessions, meetings and workshops.

Abacus textbooks are published by Pearson Education. In the US it controls 40 per cent of the standardised tests market and is considered to have tremendous political influence over educational policy decisions there. Pearson has recently been under fire from parents and teachers in the US because of poor performance.

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