[Blindmath] Understanding math versus passing standardized tests of math

[David Tseng]

I agree with you on your general point that there’s issues in the way blind
students are taught math today.

Teachers and VI specialists take on the task of creative ways to represent
information to a blind student if the student is lucky. However, the
quality of this “creativity” varies wildly amongst educators. You get even
more variation when you get to university where professors can have all
sorts of competing priorities and demands on their time.

With that said, to address your specific point, I firmly believe
visualization is quite important when dealing with math. Many concepts
(i.e. the derivative), have an intuitive definition only obtained by visual
means.
Graphing functions is another way to understand relationships between two
sets of numbers (or three in the case of three variables, and so on).

The challenge lies in the way blind students should be taught and tested.
It doesn’t change the usefulness of picturing a graph. Going through the
steps of plotting helps reinforce the aspects of functions that can seem
“abstract” when only staring at an equation.


On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Susan Jolly <easjolly at ix.netcom.com>wrote:

>
> 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
>
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