Subject: Re: [MATHEDCC] Assessment
From: Bob Leibman (bleibman@io.com)
Date: Tue Feb 08 2000 - 22:13:05 EST
At 1:06 PM -0500 2/8/00, Alton Amidon wrote:
>And the problem goes further. Our Community College graduates going on to
>a four-year college or university or often restricted in calculator use in
>higher level Mathematics, Science, and Engineering courses.
>
>Al
>
>Alton Amidon
>P.O. Box 185
>5049 Highway 306 South
>Grantsboro NC 28529
>252-249-1851
>FAX 252-249-2377
>
>>>> "Paula >>>
>Dorrit:
>
>This is one battle looming that I have not tackled. The high schools tell
>us that we are undoing much of what they have accomplished if we do not allow
>students to use scientific calculators on our placement tests. I concur, but
>have not mounted the energy to fight this particular battle.
>
>Paula
>
>
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I know that I am going to sound like a reactionary, but I am wondering just
what it is that those who use calculators in their teaching think that they
have done and, therefore, what it is the those people at the next level are
"undoing."
If the calculator is used to allow the student to learn through exploration
and thus make the concepts being studied "their own" this is great. If it
permits them to handle a greater variety of problems without the
restrictions of being limited to those which are easily done by means of
the algebra which we teach, that too is great.
I wonder, however, why, at the end of the course, that same student should
not be expected to do the simpler problems for which calculators are not
necessary with the same ease as those who did not have the benefit of
learning with a calculator.
I just noticed that the original comment was referring to scientific
calculators rather than graphing calculators, but I think the same idea
holds - the computations involved would presumably be easy enough to
reasonably expect hand calculation - or the answers would be such that a
reasonable estimate should make the correct answer clear.
I say this on a day in which a reasonably bright student in Elementary
Algebra could not tell me what 6% of $100 is, could not multiply 0.06($100)
because she didn't have her calculator - and wouldn't even try.
Bob Leibman
Austin Community College
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