Article Review
The place of Meaning in the Teaching of Arithmetic
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from tcrecord.org
From: Brownell, W. (1947). The place of meaning
in the teaching of arithmetic. The
Elementary School Journal, 47(5), 256-265.
The author
of this paper defined meaningful arithmetic as that which is aimed at teaching
arithmetic meaningfully and ensures that children learn to make sense from the
mathematical relationships. The authors complain that not everything meaningful
is taught and that not every concept in mathematics is taught in the same degree
of competency. On the other hand, meaningless arithmetic does not necessarily
mean that it is useless but just that the knowledge acquired by the learner is
wholly due to his or her own efforts (Brownell, 1947).
The author
categorized the meaning of arithmetic into four categories. The first one was
on the basic concepts such as learning whole numbers and fractions. The second
involved understanding the fundamental operations. This involves the children’s
knowledge of when to apply addition, subtraction, multiplication or division.
The third is on the meaningful principles, generalizations and relationships in
arithmetic. The fourth is on having the understanding of the decimal number
system. The child should know how to use it in the computation processes and in
algorisms.
From the
teacher’s point of view, teaching meaningful arithmetic is interesting as
opposed to just reading out facts, word for word. The teachers see the need to
develop understanding to the children and they find this more stimulating than merely
listening to memorized information. This, to them, resembles the mechanical
drills the soldiers receive – mere repetitions and cramming.
To a
student, true meaning is achieved if he or she is able to face other new
qualitative problems with confidence and becoming independent. The student
needs to find solutions through problem solving rather than from memorization.
Meaningful arithmetic should also reduce the incidences of repetition in
practice before completing the learning process.
Results
further show that many teachers have proved that meaningful arithmetic yield
results. In order to improve the instruction there are two alternatives. The
first is to double the efforts inputted earlier in the teaching process or to
change the method completely to include meaningful arithmetic. Since the first
alternative does not provide good results, the second one should be adopted.
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