Timeline for What are the essential mathematics skills that uni based STEM math educators want high school to teach students?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 8, 2022 at 14:08 | vote | accept | DRF | ||
| Jul 17, 2022 at 17:25 | comment | added | InanimateBeing | I loved your and Ryang's answer, too me these answers are nearly exhaustive and also the need of the day in today's classrooms. Present classrooms can even do without the teachers if the students are told the books' names. Unless what you have proposed happens, I think that the teachers are not required. | |
| Jul 11, 2022 at 13:56 | comment | added | Rushi | @DRF Just wanted to heads-up your Some students gain operational skills without understanding even equality observation. My answer was certainly intended in that direction -- focus on the deeper underlying meanings of things and not mere operational skills -- but is evidently not a good fit for this site and I'll bow out and delete it shortly | |
| Jul 11, 2022 at 13:41 | comment | added | Wrzlprmft | @StevenGubkin: Fortunately, my students haven’t reached that low yet (except maybe those that give up pretty quickly). | |
| Jul 11, 2022 at 13:18 | comment | added | Steven Gubkin | @Wrzlprmft In my experience, University students are currently almost completely lacking in basic skills they have been supposedly "trained" to perform anyway. Many calculus students will predict that the next number in the sequence 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 is 0.10 for example. I think that re-orienting towards genuine reasoning, and giving up the illusion of "covering content", would help the situation. | |
| Jul 11, 2022 at 9:46 | comment | added | Wrzlprmft | Another important feature of mathematics is how mastery of one body of knowledge can lay the groundwork for beginning on another. What was at first insurmountable becomes routine. – If you acknowledge this, how can you not care what specific topical groundwork students bring to university? Any university-level course will build on the expectation that students have already seen certain topics, even if they are repeated from scratch. Students who have never seen a topic will be clearly disadvantaged compared to those who are seeing it for the third time. | |
| Jul 10, 2022 at 10:31 | comment | added | Dave L Renfro | and also a nontrivial percentage of all students (5% to 10%) have sufficient mental disabilities to require special treatment that is likely not under consideration here. Indeed, by saying They might leave with "Cal 1" skills $\ldots$ seems to me to be only looking at the top 10% to 20% of high school students (indeed, about top 1% to 2% at my high school, which did not offer calculus; I was the "1" in my graduating class that generated the 1% in my class, although the situation is much better now, probably 10% or more now at my high school). | |
| Jul 10, 2022 at 10:31 | comment | added | Dave L Renfro | @DRF: don't actually leave high school with most of the essential and important skills needed for further education --- In discussions like this I think it's important to more precisely identify the students under discussion, otherwise the participants may wind up talking past each other. Many high school students (no longer most, but definitely most at my high school back when I was in high school) do not obtain further education (and of these, probably nontrivial percentage have no desire to do so), (continued) | |
| Jul 9, 2022 at 18:23 | comment | added | DRF | I realize this is opinion based. And will understand if it gets closed for that reason, but it seems like an important question and body of answers for an exchange which is to be about mathematical education. My experience is that right now many (most) students especially in the US but more and more in Europe too, don't actually leave high school with most of the essential and important skills needed for further education. They might leave with "Calc 1"skills that in some strange way don't include understanding what equality means. | |
| Jul 9, 2022 at 17:53 | history | answered | Steven Gubkin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |