[Blindmath] Understanding math versus passing standardized tests of math

[Susan Jolly]

I'm commenting as a "sightling."

I'm retired from a successful career involving applied math and computational math.  I started out as a high school chemistry teacher and then went to graduate school to get a degree in computational (theoretical) chemistry.  I can't ever remember having to plot by hand a function of two variables either as a student or in my career and I've had very little need to even interpret a plane projection of a such a function.  I do not consider this an important general "math skill".  It is, rather, something someone can learn when necessary.

From the latest discussion on this list and also from reading about math education it seems to me there is a growing disconnect between the math knowledge and understanding that is likely to turn out to be useful and the math questions that show up on standardized tests.  Questions based on visual representations are clearly unfair to students who are blind or have various visual impairments but they may also be unfair to sighted students if they obscure the students' lack of real understanding.

The CAST organization has a number of US government supported research programs aimed at Universal Design for Learning.  They have not to my knowledge addressed the problem of testing.  Here is a link to their website if you want to read more about UDL and/or contact them.

http://www.cast.org/index.html

Best wishes,
SusanJ