La Trobe University’s Science of Mathematics Education (SOME) Lab is the university's next step in spreading evidence-based pedagogy, and follows the success of the acclaimed Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab, which has been influential in a shift in Victorian Government policy towards explicit teaching.
Dr Siobhan Merlo is a senior lecturer in Mathematics Education at La Trobe and was recently appointed SOME Lab’s director. She says the Lab will operate in a similar manner to the SOLAR Lab model and address existing gaps in teacher education, offering short online courses to retrain educators in explicit teaching.
The Lab will also research numeracy education and look to help end the culture war between evidence and inquiry that has hampered Australia’s progress.
“Teachers can’t teach what they don’t understand,” Merlo says.
“We need to go back a few steps to address the long-term gaps in teacher education.
“There is a widespread misunderstanding of what maths actually is, a lack of knowledge on how concepts are connected and a general confusion about the way reasoning and problem-solving are taught.”
Merlo says with mathematics being a universal language, it needs to be taught like any language in the beginning: directly.
“So, for example, if a Japanese language teacher came into a classroom and said, ‘OK, today the activity is in groups, by the end of the session, I want you to order something from the menu in a Japanese restaurant.’
“Now, of course, that’s going to be extremely difficult if the class wasn’t taught that vocabulary directly first.
“If someone doesn’t have that information, they don’t have that knowledge, they really just need to be taught that vocabulary, so then they have the tools to approach a more complex task.”
Almost half of Australia’s 15-year-olds failed to achieve national standards in maths in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results (published in December 2023), and the nation is more than four years behind the world’s top-performing jurisdiction, Singapore.
Meanwhile, around one in three students were below expectations in 2024 NAPLAN testing and the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), from 2023, showed Australia’s education gender gap was among the worst of the 58 countries tested.
For disadvantaged and Aboriginal students, across all testing, the trends are even more stark.
Merlo tells EducationHQ that a firm focus of the Lab will be on helping teachers to better understand what we know about how the brain operates and how cognition works.
“For example, working memory capacity is limited, we have a 30-second window to get information in there and to substitute something with it pretty quickly, if it’s going to stick in their long-term memory.
“By knowing those things about how we learn, we can then adapt our pedagogy to those limitations or constraints that we’re working with.”
Professor Joanna Barbousas, Dean of Education and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Education, Impact and Innovation at La Trobe, says by collaborating with policymakers, educational organisations, teachers, students and communities to translate research into practical solutions to transform mathematics outcomes, the SOME Lab will play a critical role in addressing Australia’s continuing crisis in student numeracy.
“Many children finish school without meeting basic literacy and numeracy standards, with serious implications for social equity and the economy,” Barbousas says.
“The lifetime impact for students who fall behind on these core skills is substantial, affecting long-term employment, health and social outcomes and perpetuating cycles of disadvantage.”
The academic says teachers are expressing that they feel unprepared for the maths classroom.
“When half of our 15-year-olds fail to achieve national standards in maths, it’s not the students who are failing, it’s our approach to education,” she says.
“SOME Lab will empower educators to understand how people learn mathematics, promoting low-variance, highly systematised instructional approaches to ensure all children develop sound and robust numeracy skills.”
Beginning later this year, SOME Lab will initially be offering four full day courses largely catering to in-service teachers keen to understand better ways of getting more traction with their students' outcomes.
With so many teaching maths in out-of-field positions, Merlo says that might be an area the Lab caters to down the track.
“That’s a definite issue and something I’d like to look into some more.
“What we’ve got is a few generations, unfortunately, of instructional casualties…
“By no fault of their own, teachers who may not have had the best instruction themselves.”
As a result, Merlo continues, they are struggling to teach their own students in what appears to be a generational problem.
“So basically, we’re trying to get to the root of it and try to help the teachers, empower them and give them the confidence that they need so that they can then go into their classroom and feel less stressed about maths.”
If that starts to happen, the academic is confident we’ll start to see a turnaround.
“And hopefully into the future, but I assume it will take some time, we’ll see more students coming through schools saying, 'I want to be a maths teacher when I grow up'.
“I think that it’s just going to take some time, but I think it’s a good place to start is getting the pedagogy right and empowering teachers and giving them that boost so they can feel strong and confident in the classroom.”
In recent years, La Trobe University has been something of a beacon in the tertiary sector, in terms of innovations in teacher education, pioneering the implementation of evidence-informed approaches such as explicit instruction and the science of learning.
Its bullish transformation of its many teacher-education programs in line with evidence of what works best in classrooms has resulted in a 40 per cent increase in initial teacher education enrolment from 2022 to 2024.
SOLAR Lab has trained more than 12,000 teachers and education professionals since its launch in 2020.
