Staring at the sheet of paper on my desk, I gripped my pencil firmly in one hand and the corner of the paper in the other. No one else in Ms. Kwok’s second-grade class was more prepared than I was for the ultimate test — 60 seconds to complete 60 math sprint problems, and I usually finished long before the clock ran out.
Fast forward to high school. I now found myself reaching for my calculator for simple problems like adding 46 and 87.
I know I’m not the only one. In tutoring younger students, I’ve observed them picking up their calculators for even simpler arithmetic problems. Since students are often allowed to use calculators on tests, there is often no incentive to practice mental math. Given unrestricted access, students are relying too much on calculators for computations that could easily be done mentally or with just a few intermediate steps jotted down on paper.
Granted, calculators are still practical for understanding difficult graphical concepts and useful for making visualizations. They’re generally good for finding patterns in data, as well as crunching ugly numbers. However, trends have shown that students are increasingly using them to perform basic arithmetic that they should do on their own. A 2020 survey showed that three quarters of mathematics educators believed that students were becoming too reliant on calculators.
In ideal cases, the calculator should only be picked up after attempting the entire problem. One issue is rounding after every subsequent calculation — keeping only as many significant figures that will fit on the screen — which isn’t just annoying, as it can also introduce slight margins for error that can accumulate over multiple calculations. Ideally, students should jot down tough expressions on paper and leave figures in their original forms. This can help retain the potential for terms to cancel out in the problem later on, improving a student’s numerical literacy while also avoiding any potential rounding errors.
An overdependence on calculators also drags down the critical thinking aspect of math by requiring you to pause on the problem and tap in numbers to the calculator, interrupting the flow of thought for solving complex problems. Usually, simple arithmetic expressions that don’t require a calculator can be solved quicker without one.
Aside from being more convenient than using a calculator, challenging the mind to perform mental math also increases overall cognitive sharpness. A 2008 study involving participants to solve sets of daily math problems for six months found a significant improvement in neuropsychological measures up to six months following the end of the training period; doing such computations was found to stimulate the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
So next time you find yourself reaching for a calculator, pause and consider whether you could actually do the calculation without it — you could be doing yourself a favor in the long run.
