Brian Winkel, Director SIMIODE, http://www.simiode.org/ – look it up to find out what it is!

I teach middle school math and would like to push for GC usage but would love the data to either support or challenge that push.

“53% allow graphing calculators on exams; 27% require graphing calculators for exams.”

It appears college math instructors are somewhat less monolithic than you represent them here.

Spot on Paul. Computation is NOT mathematics. Mathematics is so much more and when mathematics people need help they turn to technology. Think ruler, compass, calculator, eraser, lined paper, etc.

I don’t tell my students not to use calculators in their work. I don’t really care. But I forbid them on exams, and they know this. So those who wish to survive my courses will understand that they cannot come to RELY on those calculators and must be prepared to work without them whenever necessary.

In the majority of college service math courses across North America students are forbidden to use calculators on exams. Regardless of whether you believe this is a good or a bad thing, it is simply reality and you have no say in the matter. Consequently if you are training your high school students to RELY on calculators, you are setting them up for near-certain failure in post-secondary math.

1) My Stewart pre-calc book has a whole chapter on polynomials: factoring, finding possible zeros, upper & lower bounds, Descartes Rule of Signs, graphing rational functions, and so on. I teach this, but recently a colleague asked me why, given that all these methods were developed for an earlier era. I have completely changed how I teach logs, particularly change of base, because I just don’t see the value. But to me, there’s still purpose in teaching this. But I haven’t had enough experience teaching pre-calc to make it something other than a lecture.

2) I have not traditionally used calculators in the classroom much–never for tests. But I now require all my trig and precalc students to download Desmos (or use the URL), and encourage them to use it to check solutions, or to *see* solutions–particularly helpful for understanding how to find multiple solutions. In our school, we have an ideological divide between the math teachers who still teach kids how to use TI models and base their classes around it, and those of us who don’t use calculators much but use Desmos as a tool.

3) I agree with what everyone is saying about the flawed methodology. But I can’t help by being struck by the test’s relevance to the life of a high school math teacher. We could give this test to kindergartners, and get a pretty decent correlation with Algebra 2 outcomes and all the occasional outliers of really struggling kids w/great math facts & great abstract thinkers w/poor calculation skills aside, abilities predict academic success. The Great Question of high school math is how to deal with the demands that we teach kids who aren’t terribly good at math who are forced to take math.

Another thing, is that the instructor should not look at the scores of the pre-test (or predictive test here) until the end of all grading. That way, he isn’t inclined to treat students differently during he semester.

As a teacher, I would perhaps try to figure out more ways to teach those algorithms, if my desired outcome was to have more students master them.

Last, I get concerned about critiquing work that I have very few details about. It would be better to engage in a conversation with the instructor to see what’s not included in the article.

Sorry – I was thinking today when I woke up… How can we possibly measure “what students learn and understand” – rather than knowing what we tested? In other words – getting away from Solving problems and “doing math” to “problem solving of the highest level – like the Moody’s or HiMCM… “