The Psychology of ArithmeticThorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Science
The Psychology of Arithmetic
Thorndike, Edward L. (Edward Lee)
Arithmetic -- Study and teaching
We need not be timid. The pupil will have no difficulty in adding,
subtracting, multiplying, and dividing with United States money--unless
we create it by our explanations! If we simply form the two bonds
described above and show by proper verification that the procedure
always gives the right answer, the early teaching of the four operations
with United States money will in fact actually show a learning profit!
It will save more time in the work with integers than was spent in
teaching it! For, in the first place, it will help to make work with
four-place and five-place numbers more intelligible and vital. A pupil
can understand $16.75 or $28.79 more easily than 1675 or 2879. The
former may be the prices of a suit or sewing machine or bicycle. In the
second place, it permits the use of a large stock of genuine problems
about spending, saving, sharing, and the like with advertisements and
catalogues and school enterprises. In the third place, it permits the
use of common-sense checks. A boy may find one fourth of 3000 as 7050 or
75 and not be disturbed, but he will much more easily realize that one
fourth of $30.00 is not over $70 or less than $1. Even the decimal point
of which we used to be so afraid may actually help the eye to keep its
place in adding.
INTEREST
So far, the illustrations of improvements in the order of bonds so as to
get less interference and more facilitation than the customary orders
secure have sought chiefly to improve the mechanical organization of the
bonds. Any gain in interest which the changes described effected would
be largely due to the greater achievement itself. Dewey and others have
emphasized a very different principle of improving the order of
formation of bonds--the principle of determination of the bonds to be
formed by some vital, engaging problem which arouses interest enough to
lighten the labor and which goes beyond or even against cut-and-dried
plans for sequences in order to get effective problems. For example, the
work of the first month in grade 2B might sacrifice facilitations of the
mechanical sort in order to put arithmetic to use in deciding what
dimensions a rabbit's cage should have to give him 12 square feet of
floor space, how much bread he should have per meal to get 6 ounces a
day, how long a ten-cent loaf would last, how many loaves should be
bought per week, how much it costs to feed the rabbit, how much he has
gained in weight since he was brought to the school, and so on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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