Comments on: Crutches and Exponents /blog_archive/2015/10/29/crutches-and-exponents/ iteration, making, building, and coding in education Sun, 15 Nov 2015 03:19:26 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.6 By: Properties of Exponents (Day 1) | When Math Happens /blog_archive/2015/10/29/crutches-and-exponents/#comment-413 Sun, 15 Nov 2015 03:19:26 +0000 http://evanweinberg.com/?p=2338#comment-413 […] Crutches and Exponents (Evan Weinberg) […]

]]> By: Evan Weinberg /blog_archive/2015/10/29/crutches-and-exponents/#comment-412 Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:20:31 +0000 http://evanweinberg.com/?p=2338#comment-412 In reply to lisahines.

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for sharing the study – certainly news to me. I wonder if there is a connection between pushing students to abstract reasoning too early and the difficulty these students have later on in understanding what they are doing in mathematics. I see the need for the abstraction, but not necessarily when it occurs in the traditional school sequence as it exists now.

]]> By: lisahines /blog_archive/2015/10/29/crutches-and-exponents/#comment-411 Thu, 29 Oct 2015 11:56:47 +0000 http://evanweinberg.com/?p=2338#comment-411 Thanks for that reminder – I feel the same way about crutches.
Interestingly, I’ve heard of a few studies linking finger counting and number sense, like this one (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18387567). It seems that for all we do to stop kids from using the “crutches” like writing things out and finger counting, we might actually be crippling them.

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