Re:How Old Is The Shepherd?
by jessaustin on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @04:33PM
(#6850382)
What a shepherd is is completely irrelevant to the problem.
...says the person privileged to know what a shepherd is. I agree that math education could be improved, but this study may not be the best basis for that improvement.
What a shepherd is is completely irrelevant [1] to the problem.
> Perhaps this is also a failure of education, but it isn't a failure of math education.
The inability to identify which things in a word problem are relevant to the question being asked is clearly a failure in education in the area of logic and reasoning, if not specifically in "math" per se.
[1] Well, unless "shepherd" is some thing that has ownership of a number of dogs and/or sheep that has a fixed mathematical relationship to its age, but I doubt any child's lack of experience with the term would leave them with a prior expectation that that was the case.