Giving students guidance on calculator use

[EvanM]

Something I struggle with for students doing Decimals/Percents and beyond is knowing when to encourage them to do long multiplication or division by hand vs. encouraging them to use a calculator.

From what I've seen on the GED site and practice exams, long multiplication or division by hand seems to be required for at most one of the questions. So it is valuable to know. At the same time, I worry that if students are tediously solving these by hand unnecessarily, that takes away time they could be spending learning new material.

This wouldn't apply to math facts, as they should know those by heart.

How do you all handle this? Is there a point during a student's math progression that we should encourage them to switch to calculators 100%? If we're on higher math and it becomes apparent the student is not confident with long division or multiplication by hand, is it worth encouraging them to go back and build those skills?

[barbseeds]

This is such a good question and one I struggle with also.  I generally encourage calculator use if I think they are fairly comfortable with long division/multiplication and their math facts.  Some students don't want to rely on it but I think it's important that they are comfortable with using it as they move on towards the test and I agree, I don't like to waste time having them do it all by hand.  
I will be really interested in what others think.

[ChrisR]

barbseeds wrote

This is such a good question and one I struggle with also.  I generally encourage calculator use if I think they are fairly comfortable with long division/multiplication and their math facts.  Some students don't want to rely on it but I think it's important that they are comfortable with using it as they move on towards the test and I agree, I don't like to waste time having them do it all by hand.  
I will be really interested in what others think.

This IS a good question!  
I generally advise students avoid using a calculator up through decimals and percents.  To that point, doing it by hand still is helping you learn the process and why things work.  However, once we get into pre-algebra (the packet "Intro to Higher Math"), I think it's good to have students start using and getting used to the calculator.

[Michael Ference]

To address the question of using calculators, I will often encourage students to use the calculators as a means for memorizing the Multiplication and Division Tables.  I also advise them to study those tables on their own.  My theory is that repeated usage of the calculator to do simple but unknown calculation aids the memory of those multiplication and division functions.  In other words, if the student can't remember 8x9=72, then repeatedly seeing it on the calculator will help in the memorization of 8x9.

[Rob.Pyle]

I struggle with this as well.  I help moderate the Light and Salt Facebook group and they are very high on "all calculator, all the time", so that the students get to more material and get to where they will pass the test.  Kate has some really good videos on using the GED calculator to skip a lot of steps (her tutorial on using the storage functions to 'automate' the Quadratic Formula is really good stuff).

However, while the GED is the short term goal, I am uncomfortable giving this guidance all the time, as knowing how to do those skills by hand is so important for really understanding what is going on and helping to give a sanity check to a calculator answer.

I end up some where in the middle, although the idea of using it more after a certian spot in the curriculum makes a lot of sense to me.

Rob