Slashdot Mirror
US Students Struggle With Understanding of the 'Equal' Sign
bickerd--- writes with news of research out of Texas A&M which found that roughly 70% of middle grades students in the US don't fully understand what the 'equal' sign means. Quoting:
"'The equal sign is pervasive and fundamentally linked to mathematics from kindergarten through upper-level calculus,' Robert M. Capraro says. 'The idea of symbols that convey relative meaning, such as the equal sign and "less than" and "greater than" signs, is complex and they serve as a precursor to ideas of variables, which also require the same level of abstract thinking.' The problem is students memorize procedures without fully understanding the mathematics, he notes. 'Students who have learned to memorize symbols and who have a limited understanding of the equal sign will tend to solve problems such as 4+3+2=( )+2 by adding the numbers on the left, and placing it in the parentheses, then add those terms and create another equal sign with the new answer,' he explains. 'So the work would look like 4+3+2=(9)+2=11.'"
These researchers might be wrong and the students right. What does the bible say about the equal sign?
I'm going to guess you're home-schooled, both because of your defensiveness and because of your lack of analytical skills (as opposed to memorization).
There are a lot of problems with your screed but the most obvious, of course, is that for all you know everything you cite is worse among those who were home-schooled compared to those who weren't. Nobody said sending your kid to school results in a perfectly polite human... because that would be idiotic. They made a comparison between two subject groups, which you did not address.
People dont understand the Equal Sign?
Well nothing is Equal in society so why should math be any different.
We have our first black president that calls his Grandmother a Typical White Racist and Holds Beer Parties at the Whitehouse to celebrate calling cops racist THEN CALLS TEAPARTY PATRIOTS RACISTS AS THEY ARE BEATEN ON VIDEO BY SEIU UNION THUGS HE CALLS HIS FAMILY
Your wife takes the kids, your money and makes you pay for her new life then tells your kids you are abusive because you caught her sleeping with your best friend's sister.
You apply for college and every minority and women who make up 51% and even illegal aliens get preferential treatment and lower tuition then you even though you test higher and work harder.
Government set asides of 15% or more in contracts give contracts to minorities and then you get screwed because they say they are already forced to use the other guys so they can't hire you for the rest of the work.
Illegal Aliens walk across the border with 50 pounds of Heroin and your son is in Afghanistan Fighting Taleban and instructed to not burn the poppy fields.
WHY WOULD ANYONE THINK EQUAL STILL MEANS EQUAL!?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let me guess: You got an F because your image wasn't static, as was demanded, and the experience guided you to get an MBA and go to management because you figured it's much more fun to set requirements and blame people for not fulfilling them than to write better than required code and then get blamed for it? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Not only that, but there are those of us who consider calling a subset of the people who live on the continent of North America "American" but not the rest to be somewhat inaccurate. It gets even worse if you consider North and South America together to be a single continent.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
No, I've heard their Barbie dolls, and they don't say anything like that. I couldn't tell *what* they were saying, but it was something like, "Maths ah odd!" Wha...?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.