Math Scores Aren’t Stagnant By Accident — We Skipped the Sense-Making

Photo: Jeanne Smith, Marine Science Educator, teaches us how to measure shell thickness of the periwinkle snail.

Math and science reform have spent the last decade promising the same thing: stop teaching kids to memorize steps, and start teaching them to actually understand what they’re doing and why. NGSS asked science teachers to build instruction around real phenomena instead of vocabulary lists. The math reforms of the same era — the ones people love to mock as “new math” — asked math teachers to build number sense and reasoning instead of just drilling algorithms.

Both were right. And in a lot of classrooms, both got quietly hollowed out into something that looks like reform but isn’t.

We skipped the sense-making.

In math, I see it constantly: students drilled on the steps of an algorithm — carry the one, flip and multiply, follow the procedure in order — without ever building an understanding of those steps work, what a fraction actually represents, or what’s really happening when you divide by a fraction instead of a whole number. They can execute. They can’t reason. The moment a problem is phrased slightly differently than the practice set, the whole thing falls apart, because there was never anything underneath the procedure to fall back on.

In science, it’s the same failure with different materials. I’ve written before about the strawberry DNA lab I used to run — kids loved it, talked about it for days, and two weeks later couldn’t tell you what the soap actually did to the cell membrane. Hands moved. Understanding didn’t. Swap “strawberry lab” for “long division worksheet” and you’re describing the exact same problem.

Sense-making isn’t a nice-to-have layered on top of content. It the content. Skip it, and you’re left with a performance of learning instead of the real thing.

In my experience coaching and supporting classrooms, I see three honest reasons this keeps happening, and none of them are “teachers don’t care”:

Some educators haven’t been trained in how to facilitate sense-making themselves. You can’t teach a skill you were never taught. Most of us were trained in the exact system we’re now being asked to move away from — procedure first, understanding optional. Facilitating genuine sense-making, where you let students grapple with a problem before you swoop in with the answer, is a completely different skill set than delivering a clear explanation. It has to be taught and practiced like any other skill.

Some don’t see it as essential compared to mastering the procedure itself. If the test rewards a correct final answer, and pacing guides reward getting through content, sense-making can look like a detour rather than the destination. This isn’t a character flaw — it’s a rational response to what the system actually measures and rewards.

Some know it matters and simply don’t feel they have the time. Sense-making is slower than direct instruction, at least in the short run. With state testing dates fixed and pacing guides unforgiving, “cover the standard” often wins out over “make sure they actually understand the standard,” even when everyone in the room knows which one will actually stick.

This is a systems problem before it’s an individual one. Which is exactly why it needs systems-level solutions — coaching, structural support, and leadership that protects the time and skill-building sense-making requires.

Here’s the part I think gets missed in a lot of the hand-wringing over stagnant math scores: procedural fluency without understanding creates a hard ceiling. Students can perform up to the exact edge of what they’ve memorized, and not one step further. They cannot transfer, adapt, or reason their way through anything unfamiliar, because there’s no conceptual foundation to reason .

You cannot drill your way past that ceiling. You can only raise it by going back and building the sense-making that should have been there in the first place. Until that happens at scale, I don’t think we should expect scores to move — no matter how many new curricula, benchmarks, or intervention blocks get added on top of the same underlying gap.

Here’s the argument I actually care most about making, and it’s not quite the one people expect.

The equity isn’t just in the teacher facilitating instead of lecturing. It’s in the problem itself. When you hand a class a real phenomenon or a genuinely complex problem — one that unfolds and gets more interesting as they dig into it, not one anyone in the room has seen broken down before — something shifts. Nobody in that room has a head start. No one’s parent can pre-teach it at the kitchen table. No prior tutoring session covered this exact problem, because it’s not a memorized procedure — it’s a shared unknown.

That’s the equalizer. Every student starts at the same place: not knowing. And they figure out, together, that there is actually something here to figure out — a real problem with a real answer, sitting right in front of the whole class at once. That collective realization is what pulls kids in. Not because the teacher made it fun, but because the group discovers, in real time, that they can reason their way toward something none of them walked in already knowing.

In a purely procedural classroom, the kids who arrive with outside advantages — the ones who’ve seen this type before, who have someone at home who can walk them through it — are already ahead before the lesson starts. A shared complex problem erases that head start. It doesn’t matter who’s seen more worksheets. It matters who can think, question, and reason alongside their classmates right now. That’s a fundamentally more level playing field than anything procedural fluency alone can offer.

This is exactly the work instructional leaders and coaches with real experience in phenomena-based, sense-making-centered instruction are built for — not another curriculum purchase, not another pacing guide revision, but people who know how to rebuild sense-making into daily instruction in both math and science classrooms, and who know how to train teachers to facilitate it with confidence instead of skipping it under pressure.

If your district is looking at stagnant math scores and quietly wondering whether the answer is yet another program, I’d ask you to consider a different diagnosis first: it might not be a materials problem. It might be a sense-making problem — and that’s a problem coaching and professional learning can actually solve.

Whether it’s a strawberry or an equation, the pattern is the same. Kids don’t need more steps to follow. They need to understand why the steps work. That’s what moves scores. It’s also what makes a classroom fair.

I help schools and districts rebuild sense-making into math and science instruction — through coaching, professional learning, and curriculum redesign grounded in phenomena-based, NGSS-aligned practice. Through Innovative STEM Solutions, I work with teachers and leaders who are ready to move past procedure-only instruction and toward classrooms where understanding — and equity — come first. If that’s the work your school needs, let’s talk.

Originally published at https://stemaficionado.substack.com on July 20, 2026.