Faced with the decline in the level of French students, particularly in mathematics, the Minister of Education Gabriel Attal announced this Tuesday, December 5, a series of measures to “restore standards to schools”. Among them, the adoption of the Singapore method in primary school, from the next school year.
After the announcement of the results of the international Pisa study, carried out among 690,000 students in 81 countries around the world, including France, the French Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, announced this Tuesday, December 5, a series of reforms to “restore standards” to schools, middle schools and high schools in France.
Regarding the teaching of mathematics in primary schools, the government wants to implement in primary schools from next September the “Singapore method”, a “model student” country according to the OECD.
From “concrete” to “imagery” to “abstract”
This method, developed by the Singapore Ministry of Education in the early 1980s and known worldwide today, would make it possible to train the best students in mathematics, by basing their teaching on a three-step concept: the “concrete” approach. -imaged-abstract”.
Concretely, it thus aims to move “from concrete”, with the manipulation of objects such as cubes, sticks or tokens, thus making it possible to maintain a student’s attention, to a second, more pictorial phase, which replaces the object by a drawing or diagram. Once this technique has been integrated, the third step consists of carrying out the calculation using the principles discussed previously.
A “classic and effective” pedagogy
This “classic and effective” pedagogy, designed for students from CP to sixth grade, helps to learn “mathematical reasoning”. “One of the principles of this method is to treat fewer subjects, but in depth,” explained in 2016 to Point the founder of the “School Bookstores”, Jean Nemo.
The four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) are learned from CP, and fractions or areas from CE1, but always in a progressive and simple manner.
The Singapore method, already recommended in 2018 by the mathematician MP Cédric Villani, is already applied in 70 countries according to Minister Gabriel Attal, including the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Chile and Africa. from South. Some French schools already use it as well. In 2016, between 1,500 and 2,000 classes used it in France.