This would never happen if there was a laptop in every classroom.
Yes, the superior abstract reasoning that the computer imparts would definitely solve this!
(I'm also fairly skeptical of this finding).
From the article:
The “How Old Is the Shepherd?” question was popularized by an essay written by Professor Katherine K. Merseth in 1993 and was based on research by Professor Kurt Reusser in a paper presented at the 1986 American Educational Research Association annual meeting. It is noteworthy that Professor Merseth wrote that “researchers report that three out of four schoolchildren will produce a numerical answer to this problem.” Twenty years later that statement still held true.
Part of the problem with this question is that many students today don't know what a "shepherd" is. Perhaps this is also a failure of education, but it isn't a failure of math education. It would be better to say a "farmer" owns these animals, since most children would have heard the word "farmer" at some point in their lives. Or maybe it would be better to say "your neighbor" has so many cats and so many dogs but then the kids would probably just guess some advanced age because crazy cat ladies.
> Part of the problem with this question is that many students today don't know what a "shepherd" is.
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.
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.
Really? I don't see that as being part of the problem. I have no idea whether it's true or not, but suspect it depends largely on socioeconomic status and geography.
Even if the children aren't familiar with the term "shepherd", it still comes down to the fact that they do not have enough information to answer the question and still attempt to perform some sort of calculation with no reasoning of why they are doing it.
That was sarcasm. My point was that if this level of critical thinking deficiency is really present, then there is something seriously wrong with the way kids are being taught, and calls that you hear for extra funding to pay for things like laptops in the classroom are really a giant waste of money until we fix whatever that is.
That's a good example of Poe's law. I decided to reply with (hopefully more apparent) sarcasm, because if it wasn't sarcasm, I didn't want to let it go, and if it was, I didn't want to be an ass, and I assumed you could take it as me going with the joke.
Well, if students could use the laptop during the test, since its a no-answer question that comes directly from well-publicized earlier research, at least some of them would google it and probably get the correct answer.
This doesn't, of course, address the fundamental issue that the test reveals, but it would impact the results of the test.
EDIT: Just watched the video. Scary.