Captain's syndrome
Under age of the captain or captain symptoms refers to the phenomenon that many learners in Mathematics try technical tasks - called Captain tasks to solve which are not objectively developed, d -. H. which cannot be solved at all based on the given facts. Here are numbers from the object text independent of the context of operation signs linked and specified the calculation result as a solution.
The name Captain's Syndrome refers to a task for an investigation into this phenomenon.
research results
A working group on elementary education at the Institut de Recherche sur l'Enseignement des Mathématiques (IREM) in Grenoble studied children from the second and third grade. She asked the children to answer the following question: “There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship. How old is the captain? ”76 of the 97 pupils questioned answered the question by combining the given numbers of the task in some way and giving a solution to the question, although there are none. This behavior was shown in several similarly structured questions.
It was also observed that children even performed arithmetic operations when the solution was already apparent in the question, such as the question “A 27-year-old shepherd has 25 sheep and 10 goats. How old is the shepherd? ”. The older the children are, the more often they perform arithmetic operations on captain's tasks.
background
The reason for the Grenoble investigation was a letter from 1841 by the French author Gustave Flaubert to his sister Caroline, in which he asked:
- A cotton-laden ship of 200 register tons coming from Boston sails to LeHavre, the main mast has broken, there is a cabin boy on the forecastle, twelve passengers are on board, the wind is east-northeast, the ship's clock shows a quarter past three in the afternoon and it is May ... How old is the captain?
literature
- Stella Baruk: How old is the captain? About the mistake in mathematics. Birkhäuser Verlag , Basel, Boston, Berlin, 1989, ISBN 3-7643-1881-3 .
- Reto U. Schneider : How old is the captain? In: Folio. Supplement to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. 2013. No. 9, p. 54.
Web links
- Google Book Search: On the "captain's symptoms" of understanding in class. In: Leske, CW (1999): Fehlerwelten (Ed. Althof, W.). Leverkusen: Verlag + Budrich GmbH.
- L'âge du capitaine. In: Wiktionnaire, le dictionnaire libre source of the quotation.
Individual evidence
- ^ W. Affolter, G. Beerli, H. Hurschler, B. Jaggi, W. Jundt, R. Krummenacher, A. Nydegger, B. Wälti and G. Wieland: mathbu.ch. Impulses for mathematics didactics . Schulverlag blmv AG and Klett and Balmer AG, Bern and Zug, 2006.
- ↑ A. Hollenstein: Writing occasions in mathematics lessons . Publishing house Paul Haupt, Bern, Stuttgart, Vienna, 1996.
- ^ School mathematics absurd . Spiegel, January 17, 2012
- ↑ Flaubert, Gustave; Correspondance , première série (1830–1850), G. Charpentier et C ie , Éditeurs, Paris, 1887