Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
What benefit is there to rote memorization of common fractions in this day and age, though? We all have calculators in our pocket and most often, real world problems aren’t going to come out to neat fractions like 1/8 or 1/4. I think the time spent on forcing kids to memorize a table of decimals/fractions could be better used elsewhere.
There’s no benefit to rote memorization. Understand how to fluidly convert between the two is necessary to understand algebra that your pocket calculator can’t just spit the answers out for you. Also for some reason calculators don’t do order of operations correctly, so it’s useful to know how the language works, not memorizing by rote.