kitchen table math, the sequel: shameless self-promotion

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Catherine Johnson said...: hey!

aren't you supposed to be writing your Ricky II post!?; January 17, 2007 at 11:44 AM
Catherine Johnson said...: Jakob Nielsen would have to put on a frowny face if he read your post title

but i think you know that; January 17, 2007 at 11:45 AM
Instructivist said...: Cross-posted RWN:

The one good thing about estimation I can think of is that it can serve as a reasonableness check for one's calculations -- to make sure one is in the ballpark since error is a frequent occurrence.

Of course, the stress on estimation gets perverted if it leads to the denigration of precise answers.

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This endless babbling about "critical thinking" one encounters in ed school is mindnumbing. Usually, these zealous promoters of "critical thinking" invoke the phrase in rote fashion, as I like to say (a bit of an irony here), and are themselves averse to analysis and thinking. That's why these ed buzzwords and ed tenets are not subjected to scrutiny and the thick fog never lifts.

I have been puzzled about the origin of the of the "higher-order thinking skills" mania and believe to have found it in an interpretation (really misinterpretation) of Bloom's Taxonomy. I explain it here in a tirade I once wrote HOTS; January 17, 2007 at 10:21 PM