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Education Dive
Teaching students to use what's around them bolsters critical thinking
Lauren Barack
Feb. 26, 2020
Dive Brief:
Middle school math teacher Kelly Baum-Sehon incorporates calculators
into lessons to help students develop more confidence in their
abilities, particularly with fractions and percentages, while boosting
their interest in the subject and helping them think about other ways
to approach problems, he writes for Edutopia.
With percentages, he gives students problems as well as answers,
challenging them to use a calculator to figure out how to arrive at the
solution from a different angle. This process also forces students to
consider the similarities and differences between decimals and
percentages.
With fractions, he shows students how to convert those numbers to
decimals and vice-versa, building them up to improper fractions and
mixed numbers, finding student confidence grows as they continue to
work independently.
Dive Insight:
Critical thinking skills are essential to helping students make key
decisions throughout their lives, and in any future career. They're the
ability to assess what’s happening, take in the details and data
available, and then create a course of action to follow. These
decisions can be as mundane as a parent selecting a breakfast cereal
with less sugar or as complex as a doctor choosing a medical procedure
for a patient with a chronic illness.
Students learn critical thinking skills in schools almost innately,
from knowing they need to move more quickly during a timed test to
understanding they need to divide work on a group project they hope
will be successful.
The key factor to developing and strengthening critical thinking is the
ability to identify resources that are useful and knowing how to put
them into play. As Baum-Sehon wrote for Edutopia, calculators are
resources that can assist students and scaffold them in their math
work, but they also instill confidence that then supports learners as
they tackle new mathematical concepts.
What students embed is more than the math lesson at hand, but also a
critical thinking skill — how the right tools can help them find an
answer.
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