Assignment 12: “You Being the Expert”

Analyzers and summarizers for assignment 12:

Hand-Held Calculators — What Should the Boulder Valley School District Do?

• position 1: ignore the existence of the gadget; we are not interested in technology, but in important mathematical skills; recommendation: do not use hand-held calculators in schools

• position 2: keep the curriculum the same, make children learn arithmetic, multiplication tables, long division, drawing square root by hands; recommendation: after they have it all mastered, allow the use of hand-held calculators.

• position 3: invent/ create new calculators, new curricula, new scaffolding mechanisms that make learning these skills more fun and create a deeper understanding of underlying concepts — recommendation: using these hand-held calculators, the learners would acquire the skills and the knowledge and eventually become independent of the gadget (“scaffolding with fading”)

• position 4: find new ways to distribute responsibilities between humans and machines such that humans do the qualitative reasoning, use estimation skills, relate the mathematical result to the real world and machines do the detailed quantitative computations recommendation: establish new divisions of labor, rely on distributed intelligence

Please do the following:

• develop a principled argument for your recommendation (can you provide evidence, data, …?)
• discuss the major weaknesses of the other choices
• relate your argumentation to the article by Roy Pea