Calculators in elementary schools? Some tentative guidelines and questions based on classroom experience
Search for other papers by Max S. Bell in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
It seems certain that electronic calculators will cause something of a revolution in the availability and use of calculating power in the world outside of schools. This special issue of the Arithmetic Teacher indicates that there is considerable agreement that they should also play an important role in school instruction. But viable school roles will not be established without finding solutions to many problems: problems of philosophy, problems of curriculum and methodology, problems of design, and school management of the calculators themselves. In the belief that solutions to many of these problems should be worked out in actual classrooms, a small band of local teachers and myself began several years ago to explore classroom uses of calculators. This article reports some of our tentative conclusions and our questions resu lting from these explorations.
