In a post on the ChemEd-L email discussion list, Harry Pence wrote:
There is a common assumption that if students can do the calculations, they understand what the calculations mean. I didn’t always find this to be true.
This is exactly my problem with the way schools are responding to the assessment requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2000. The tacit assumption is that if the student can reliably get the correct answer, then the student has a deep understanding of the concepts involved.
As I teach students who went through the NCLB-derived system from earlier and earlier ages, I’m finding that their high-order thinking skills are more and more lacking. More and more of my high school students don’t even know how to begin solving a problem that is different from problems that they’ve seen before. If they know a trick for getting “the right answer” to a type of question, they blindly apply it without the faintest clue what they’re doing.
I used to think I was being clever when I could create a question that turned their trick into a trap that led them to the wrong answer. The problem is that even when I show them the problem inherent in their method, what they should have done, and why it works, they’re unable to follow my reasoning. Once the trick fails, most of them decide that they’re simply not capable of understanding what’s really going on, and they tune the whole discussion out.
This kind of thing is being done from a very early age; my sister (who lives in San Diego) was showing me her first grader’s prepare-for-standardized-tests fill-in-the-bubbles math homework. By the time these kids get to high school or college, there are a lot more years of damage to their critical thinking skills than we can undo.
Originally posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list.
