Teaching and Learning Mathematics In Rural Schools: Issues and Concerns

Introduction

• The notion of mathematics education in rural schools and communities has seldom received any attention from researchers.

• Rural areas provide an opportunity for studying math-related issues and attempting improvement. In fact, the nation's self-image and destiny are strongly linked to a land ethic and to other rural commitments such as family and community. Sustaining rural places is, in many ways, tantamount to sustaining the nation, as is the sort of schooling that takes place in rural settings (Howley, 2003).

Characteristics of Rural Schools

• Due to isolation and low population density in rural communities, rural schools are typically small compared to schools in higher populated communities.

• These schools and students, then, because of geographic location must cope with unique hardships.  In sparsely populated rural areas, students often travel long distances in adverse weather conditions to attend school.  The daily commute that results imposes a severe constraint on the daily lives of these students. Fatigue sets in by early afternoon which affects their motivation and performance. 

• Several researchers suggest that rural budgets are often small and do not adequately cover the considerable cost of operating a school.  Furthermore, the programs and extra-curricular activities offered in rural schools are limited, affecting students’ opportunity to learn. 

• Studies have also indicated that rural schools have a disproportionate number of special-needs students, but lack funding to properly care for them. 

• Finally, even though the average class size is much smaller than that in urban areas, rural teachers end up teaching a wider and more extensive course load than their urban counterparts.  This is a result of the inability to hire and retain qualified teachers in rural areas. 

Declining Enrolment

• Declining enrolment is having a drastic effect on the quality of education in our system. 

• Early research seems to indicate that even though there are some disadvantages associated with the use of distance learning, the advantages far outweigh them (Barker, 1990).  However, is this really accurate?

• Rural students tend to have limited access to advanced courses in mathematics because there are too few students to make it feasible to offer such courses.  As enrolment decreases in rural schools, the reliance of secondary schools on distance education courses increases. 

• For mathematics and science courses this has serious consequences.  A 1998 study by Ballou and Podgursky reported that high school students in  rural school setting were less likely to enrol in advanced mathematics courses (advanced algebra, analytic geometry, trigonometry, or calculus) (Castro & Silver, 2003).  When given the choice of completing a course via distance education or in the classroom most students will choose the in-class course.  This may be due to them wanting to be in a class with their peers for social reasons, the preference of having a teacher in the room with them for assistance, or simply due to not wanting to be completing a course on their own.

• One of the disadvantages of rural schools is that many classes, especially at the elementary level, are multi-grade.  This requires a teacher to plan more lessons and means that the amount of individualised attention given to students is less (Cross, Leahy, & Murphy, 1989). 

• Between covering the lesson topic, providing assistance to students who request help, checking to see if these students who are not asking questions are on task, and dealing with other classroom management issues, some students have to be getting lost in the process.  This is not fair to the student falling further and further behind, nor is it fair to the student who is not being challenged due to lack of enrichment.

Resources

• There has been a drastic push over the last decade to use various forms of technology in the classroom to help students learn more effectively (Beaudin & Grigg, 2001).  For mathematics courses the areas of technology that has received the greatest push have been the use of computers and graphing calculators in the classroom.

• Many mathematics teachers avoid integrating computer technology in their classrooms because teachers do not feel comfortable using the technology due to the fact that they do not know how to integrate it into their daily lessons. 

• In addition scheduling and quality of available resources plays a great role determining the extent that technology is used.

• Most rural schools only have one computer lab outside of the one created for the CDLI students. When the yearly schedule is designed, those teachers that are teaching technology courses get first selection of the available time slots.  This is understandable seeing that it would be very difficult to teach a technology course without the technology.  The remaining time slots are then shared between the remaining classes.  This means that other teachers end up with four or five periods (at most) of computer lab time out of a seventy period cycle.  In addition, only one or two of these periods may be when the teacher is teaching the course that requires the lab.

• The second difficulty that smaller schools encounter is that the quantity and quality of computers is unsatisfactory.  This is an economic difficulty that many schools face.  Most computer labs have 15-25 computers and few of these are reasonably up-to-date.   It is very difficult to use computers in the classroom when you have a limited number of available units and on any given day two of these may be out of order and the others run so slow that students get frustrated and impatient using them.  The irony is that the CDLI room has state-of-the-art computers that are updated every year to service a handful of the schools students while the rest of the school population has to continue using hardware that was outdated years ago.

• The same can be said for the use of graphing calculators.  Most rural schools have a classroom set that is to be used for the senior high mathematics program.  The problem is that there may be more than one mathematics class taking place in the same slot.  The result is that classes have to share the few calculators provided.  Usually this means that each class gets 4 or 5 and they have to make due.  The dilemma that rural educators are faced with is how to cover course outcomes that require the use of graphing calculators if the technology is unavailable.

• One of the most, if not the most, valuable resources schools have are their students.  As previously discussed, forcing gifted students into the academic classroom may be unjust.  Alternatively, when the more gifted students decide to pursue an advanced course that is offered on-line there are other drawbacks to consider.  By removing such a student from the regular classroom one loses a valuable resource.

• Just as students are important resources in the mathematics classroom, so are teachers.  First and foremost, schools need qualified mathematics teachers.  While urban schools have little difficulty meeting this requirement the same cannot be said for rural schools.  Too often rural schools are unable to hire a trained mathematics teacher and are forced to hire another teacher to fill the position.  The result is that the teacher is under a great amount of pressure to properly teach a subject that they are not qualified to teach and the students do not receive the same quality of education they would from a trained mathematics teacher.

Student Learning

• Social condition, social tradition or culture, and social goals influence student learning. For example, the education level of parents is a social condition that impacts learning. Parents' education level is associated with student learning as parents trust, desire, or demand that schools stimulate their children's academic accomplishments; accomplishments that are typically expected to match or exceed those of the parents.  Parents also expect schools to support their children's emergence as contributing members of their community or culture (Mathematics Teaching and Learning in Poor Communities: A Working Conference, 1998).

• Social goals also influence student learning as there are differing expectations or aspirations for education. In many communities, K-12 schooling is perceived as a critical step in the process of earning a college diploma, with inherent expectations for future economic and social benefits. However, in rural communities, adolescents frequently experience conflict between career aspirations and their preferences for a future rural residential location. This is because both adolescents and adults in rural communities recognize that the economic benefits associated with a college diploma may only be accessible at locations removed from the parents and family who reside in a local area.

• Traditionally, rural schools provide an education program that prepares students for post-secondary institutions and life in a high-tech urban world.  That program does not prepare them to remain in their own communities.  Education thus serves mostly as an agency for recruiting and exporting the best human resources out of rural communities (Hathaway, 1993).

• Those concerned about the decline of rural communities feel the most promising direction for revitalization and survival rests with education and the linkages that can be developed between school and community.  This means changing the traditional role of the school (Miller, 1993).

• One possible solution might include using the school as a community center.  When the school is used as a community center it serves as both a source of lifelong learning and as a vehicle for the delivery of a wide range of services.  Using the community as a curriculum, it emphasizes the study of community in its various dimensions.  By basing the curriculum in the things and people students are familiar with the purpose is not to persuade students to stay when their schooling within the community is over, anymore than that it is to persuade them to leave.  Conceptually, the idea is to allow them to make an informed decision about whether to stay or go.  Such schooling should provide them with an understanding of the nature of community, an understanding which they can put to use wherever they choose to spend the rest of their lives (Miller, 1993).

• For many students, mathematics often serves as a stumbling block to academic success. This is often a factor of: prior negative experiences; content that is distanced from students' experiences; an unfocused, repetitive curriculum; and a lack of understanding about the role and power of mathematics.

• It is evident that the mathematics content that is taught in schools is an important and critical factor impacting the future success of students in mathematics. School mathematics content must be worthwhile in nature, have mathematical integrity and rigor, and provide options for students.

• The learning of mathematics by students in rural communities has been limited, not only by the availability of courses, but also by the focus or perspective of the instruction. Too often the curriculum in rural classrooms is based on the "conventional wisdom" that students are deficit and that the curriculum should follow a fixed sequence of lessons, emphasizing practice and moving from basic to more advanced skills without ever addressing problem solving or reasoning (Mathematics Teaching and Learning in Poor Communities: A Working Conference, 1998).

• The mathematics to which students have access should not be a factor of where they live or the social conditions to which they are born.

School, District, and Community Context

• District personnel need to access models or exemplars of success, models for staff development, high-quality learning resources for mathematics (including instructional materials), on-going technical assistance, and follow-up support.

• At the school level, assistance is needed to help teachers and administrators develop the knowledge and skills necessary to make sound decisions about mathematics curriculum, instruction, assessment, and other critical issues.

• Mathematics education can both reflect and influence the political and social dynamics of a culture (Bush, 2003).  Our future political stability, economic growth, and national development depend upon the planned development of Canada’s rural regions.  Rural schools are a principal component of such economic strategies.  Therefore, the professional resources and instructional needs of these schools must be assigned a higher priority (Haughey & Murphy, 1983).

• Members of rural communities are better acquainted with each other than their urban counterparts.  Teachers and administrators know the parents, and the parents know their children’s teachers and administrators (McClelland, 1997).  It is this close relationship that allows for more parental involvement and research indicates that parental involvement is a remedy for low achievement in rural schools (Bickel, Howley & McDonough, 1997).

• Some schools have established successful parent professional development projects that assist the parents in understanding how state or local educational accountability outcomes or standards relate to their children.

• One model for developing parental awareness of standards-based curriculum is to hold Math Nights. These are evening sessions where parents become familiar with the expectations that the district or school has for mathematics at each grade level and learn about the meaning of different forms of assessments.

• Another vehicle for building parental understanding of the approaches being used in mathematics instruction is to hold Family Math Nights where parents experience mathematics activities within centers where their children serve as facilitators directing and explaining the center activity.

• A third model for parental involvement is being developed where children come with their parents or guardians to after-school sessions that use multicultural literature as a context for mathematical problem solving. In this model, teachers demonstrate reading comprehension questioning strategies as a story is read aloud to the children and their accompanying adults. Then the teachers use the context of the story as the setting for engaging parents in working on mathematics problems with their children (Mathematics Teaching and Learning in Poor Communities: A Working Conference, 1998).

Concluding Remarks

·        A suggested solution to the challenges of teaching and learning mathematics in rural communities is to promote widespread efforts that support educational quality and equality within schools and school districts that serve students who live in rural areas (Haas, McSwan & Scott, 1995).

·        It is critical that teachers, administrators, students, parents, community leaders, and higher education partners work together to raise the likelihood that students will become engaged in their education and will learn mathematics.

·        The reforms that are needed are expensive, and some may question whether the cost is justified. Yet, we cannot fail to undertake such efforts. Mathematical competence is an important qualification for many education and employment opportunities, thus attention to mathematics education in these schools is especially critical.