Stephen Downes

Fill in the blank:  7 + 2 = [_] + 6. If you're like me, you instinctively said '1' and would have been among the 25 percent of students who got the question wrong in the University of California San Diego's (UCSD) remedial math class. Now, of course, I know (and so do you) that the correct answer is '3' and there's no chance that I would really be wrong about this. So what happened? My take is that there's something about the way the question is posed that leads to a quick wrong answer. I think a lot of math - and probably a lot of math testing - is like this (though I have no real evidence for that statement). It's like when people say "No one can do fractions." I think they can, they just aren't given the tools (simple things, like asking "what is 1/2 of 1/4" instead of "what is 1/2 times 1/4" (in both cases, it's 1/8)). I struggled with calculus, for no good reason other than that - it was presented to me as a bunch of stuff I had to remember, and not a bunch of stuff I should understand. Kelsey Piper says "Cargo cult equity needs to die." But I think we need to think more seriously about what equity actually means.