In the classrooms of Singapore, calculators are not crutches
The researcher points out the constant importance in education in the case of school in UK, wherein there is a prohibition in the future to use calculators in math examinations to all 11-year-old students. He also added a question: when do the tools we use to learn become crutches we can’t do without?
He shares his student life when they had to fully examine the roots and content of a narrative book to make a guess based on knowledge and experience and therefore likely to be correct about definition or interpretation. They felt a sudden feeling of excitement when they got it correct, but sometimes, they just didn’t get it right. In modern times, there’s no demand in analyzing the roots when the description is just simple to found in different web browser or search engines. The question that pops out is do weban Google in the classroom? With the same system, computer program that provides special capabilities beyond that of a text editor can provide us grammar checker. The checklist of different devices just keeps on functioning.
During the year 2007, the implementation of education strategy in Singapore released that calculators should only be used in the classroom for fifth year students in primary school. Children will be given enough time to make their mathematical skills improve better. This teaching technique is also comprehensible that calculators should be utilized for analysis and improvement of reasoning and problem-solving when it comes to mathematics.
In addition, both mental computation and problem-solving skills has its stability when it comes to their importance in evaluation system. In terms of civil examination, one of the two papers, grade six primary school leaving examination has permitted to use calculators.
In 2010, during the starting point of the research conducted by David Hogan and Phil Towndrow at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, they discovered that the primary school teachers in Singapore give special importance for cognitive calculation compared to dependency to use calculators.
Finally, they also observed that instructors didn’t utilize calculators in their teaching method when they discussed about standard mathematics. Instead, they only use calculators for problem-solving like topics related to percentages and statistics.
M. Kapur