17th May 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Lots of our maths and science tutors are surprised at how much students use calculators. There are lots of occasions where calculators are a must, and an amazing invention. Finding logarithms, and trigonometric answers used to be painstakingly slow; tales from older teachers about painstakingly looking up the answers in reference books and how long it took. However, many students today are losing skills and wasting time because of their reliance on calculators.
One story is a student who had to do 300 multiplied by 2, and did it on a calculator. Her tutor pointed out a couple of things. Firstly, is it more likely that she will get the answer wrong in her head, or by pressing the wrong button? Maybe more importantly, those valuable extra calculator-spent seconds add up over the duration of an exam and could mean the difference between the extra mark gained in the dying seconds which gives her a better grade.
There is an argument that there’s no point to mental arithmetic anymore. Technology has relieved us of the arduous task of doing complicated sums in our head, just like making a mixed tape or owning an encyclopaedia.
The truth is that a lack of mental arithmetic skill and practice has a profound effect on the way that students understand lots of areas of maths. We see the calculator as something which removes a difficult task for us, but there is so much value in thinking about how the numbers work and deeply understanding the basic operators: addition and multiplication. It might explain why for many students who did well at maths at a young age, algebra and more complicated ideas at A Level can be such a shock.