Mathematics

California charter schools outperform traditional public schools in reading but significantly lag in math, according to a national study released Monday by researchers at Stanford University.

In the airy computer lab at Romero-Cruz Elementary School in Santa Ana, 11-year-old Davis Nguyen quickly completed math problems. Each correct answer let an animated penguin named JiJi take steps across a bridge. The computer game looked simple, but backers say it is part of an innovative and powerful new way to teach math, and standardized test results released Tuesday appear to back up their claims. Across the state, schools saw a 4.5% increase in the number of elementary students scoring "proficient" or "advanced" in math.

In China, competitive math teams are groomed and cosseted like college football squads. And in Vietnam, a television show called "Go to Olympia" tracks math contestants almost as if they were budding American Idols. So it came as little surprise that when Pasadena City College's math team won a national contest this year, six of the members were Chinese-born. The seventh arrived from Vietnam two years ago.

The notion that boys are better than girls at math simply doesn't add up, according to a study published today in the journal Science. An analysis of standardized test scores from more than 7.2 million students in grades 2 through 11 found no difference in math scores for girls and boys, contradicting the pervasive belief that most women aren't hard-wired for careers in science and technology.

The new state policy of requiring algebra in the eighth grade will set up unprepared students for failure while holding back others with solid math skills, a new report has concluded. These predictions, based on national data, come in the wake of an algebra mandate that the state Board of Education, under pressure from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, adopted in July.

A Sacramento Superior Court judge Friday blocked a controversial state plan requiring that all California eighth-graders be tested in algebra. The state's algebra mandate would have been the most ambitious in the nation. The state Board of Education approved the high-reaching goal in July as a way to push school districts into having all students enroll in algebra by the end of the eighth grade. State board president Ted Mitchell vowed to appeal the decision.

A century-old math puzzle so complicated that its handwritten solution would cover the island of Manhattan was finally cracked by an international research team that had been working on it for four years. The 18-member group of mathematicians and computer scientists was convened by the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto to map a theoretical object known as the "Lie group E8."

A buzzed-about U.S. Department of Education study released this month found that some popular software programs schools use to teach math and reading are pretty worthless. I'm a chump for any pedagogic tool that beeps or lets me click on animated bunnies, so I was ready to write skeptically about the study.

It stands like a sentry, on the lookout for tempests around the clock. Yet until this year, South Florida's primary weather Doppler radar had been unable to detect the most dreaded of tropical storms: those that explode in strength just before reaching land. Now, the bulbous installation in remote southwestern Miami-Dade County has been enhanced with a new program to better predict a storm's intensity at the point of impact.

WASHINGTON -- Math scores continued to rise in the Los Angeles Unified School District, but reading is showing no improvement with fourth-graders ranking among the lowest among urban districts, according to a federal report released Thursday. Every two years, 11 urban districts, including Los Angeles, test their fourth- and eighth-grade students in math and reading.