An Argument Against Calculators in Early Education

The other day while running I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Mindscape by Sean Caroll. In this episode, he was interviewing Dean Buonomano is one of the leading neuroscientists studying how our brains perceive time, which is part of the bigger issue of how we construct models of the physical world around us.

As they were talking the topic turned to something that I think is extremely relevant to learning and education. It has to do with knowledge and thought. This is part of a larger conversation they were having, but I think this small excerpt from their transcript will sum up the big idea I will use in my discussion below. This is around minute 10 in the podcast.
...so knowledge is the infrastructure of thought, so in order to think about the problem, you have to have the data already built in, embedded into your neural circuits. If I ask you to think about a problem in physics, to create some novel idea, you need to have those primitive concepts already embedded in your circuits, that’s why you think about something differently than I think about something. So the idea that somebody who doesn’t know anything about quantum physics will just tap into their mental interface and load that up into their brain, they might gather information, but I don’t think they’ll be able to build upon that information, because that information is the substrate of creativity and thought.
Making the connection to calculators.
While things like calculators might, on the surface make things easier for students, what I feel, we are doing is actually a detriment to their thinking and creativity in the long run. We have to take into account the important, nay vital aspect of the learning process. That process of building our number sense and connections between numbers is a fundamental part of how they will think and the ideas they will generate. If they are just doing calculations on a calculator, they might learn how to get the right answer but they are missing out on the "infrastructure" in which they should be building on.
While many educators will agree with this, I feel some will also say, "but what about after the students have learned their basic math". Then they just use it to be more efficient. While I totally agree with this logic, and of course this is true, I disagree that most students will get to that point before late middle school or even into high school. This just leads to another problem I see in education which is the watering down of effort, and I believe that this problem lies more with teachers and parents (and maybe society in general). It is easier just to let students use calculators to do the work than to encourage them and push them to work hard and build up and use their knowledge. It leads to something like this: Ok I see you have become proficient at your math facts, so not you don't need to use them anymore, just do it on a calculator. Moreover, many students somehow squeak by without even becoming proficient in the first place.
In reality, this is part of a larger issue in education about learning, knowledge, and creativity. We have come to understand that these things are built on the facts and processes we have in our long-term memory. Not just the facts and processes but the schema we have build up as well. But there is also an undercurrent of trying to make learning "easy" for students, or "fun" and "interesting". While I definitely want learning to be fun and interesting for everyone, the way we go about it, like allowing students to use calculators too early in education, many times has the exact opposite effect we are hoping for.

Submitted April 12, 2021 at 05:22AM by rmurphe https://ift.tt/3a6gDVB