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A comment on Matrix Multiplication. Parent comment

Re:Matrix Multiplication by leshow on Friday November 25, 2016 @03:38PM (#13039658)
I don't know how you think that school systems, especially in the west, place more emphasis on "how" than "why". Western schools most definitely place their emphasis on "understanding" rather than "doing". I think that all this does it create a false sense of understanding. Students think they understand why something is done, then when they go to do an actual problem they are totally lost.

I think this is a big reason why american students rate themselves as being very confident in their understanding, but performing rather poorly compared to other nations. I'll have to look for the citation to back that up.

Just my 2cents.

edit: http://www.newgeography.com/content/003840-high-confidence-n...

there were other more recent surveys on this topic, this is all i can find right now

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Re:Matrix Multiplication by romwell on Saturday November 26, 2016 @08:39PM (#13047218)
>I don't know how you think that school systems, especially in the west, place more emphasis on "how" than "why".

I've taught people at college level, and have seen way too many cases of people knowing how to perform the steps to, say, solve an equation, find a derivative or take an integral without understanding what the operations actually mean, or why bother with all this stuff in the first place.

It's not the students' fault; the concerns I am trying to voice have been articulated by many over the recent years, and are best summed up here: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

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