Psychologist Daniel Kahneman dedicates his book Thinking Fast and Slow to the memory of Amos Tversky, his long-time collaborator. Tversky was considered so brilliant by his colleagues that they came up with the Tversky Intelligence Test: The faster you realise that Amos Tversky is smarter than you, the smarter you are. It has occurred to […]
We’re sure we’ll live to regret this post, but yesterday’s VCE Methods Exam 1 looked like a good exam. No, that’s not a set up for a joke. It actually looked like a nice exam. (It’s not online yet. Update: Now online.). Sure, there were some meh questions, the inevitable consequence of an incompetent study design. And […]
Yes, we’ve used that title before, but it’s a damn good title. And there is so much madness in Mathematical Methods to cover. And not only Methods. Victoria’s VCE exams are coming to an end, the maths exams are done, and there is all manner of new and astonishing nonsense to consider. This year, the Victorian Curriculum and […]
When we first met Sandra Milligan, “Enterprise Professor” at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, she was ringleading a bunch of school principals in a campaign against the ATAR. The Age‘s Adam Carey gave Milligan and her cronies a free kick article, because of course it’s not the job of an education reporter […]
One of the shiny new expressions of mathematics education is algorithmic thinking or, if one prefers, computational thinking. It is 10% shrewd rebranding and 90% poisonous snake oil. The new Australian Curriculum is full of it.
Last year, after the appearance of ACARA’s appalling draft curriculum, we ran a competition: find the best Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elaboration. No one took our competition seriously. This was perhaps unsurprising, since most readers of this blog would have been sceptical already, and then our introduction to the competition hammered the ATSI cross-curriculum […]
Sorry, no energy for a joke title. The reports are here (Word, idiots): Specialist Exam 1 report (and exam) Specialist Exam 2 report (and exam) Methods Exam 1 report (and exam) Methods Exam 2 Report (and exam) For background, readers may wish to go to the following blog posts: Specialist Error List (and see here, […]
INTRODUCTION The word “equivalent” is one of the most useful in mathematics and one of the most abused in mathematics education. The implication is that this one is not all ACARA’s fault. Nonetheless, the fact that it was predictable that ACARA would make a mess of it doesn’t alter the fact that ACARA made a […]
The following is our complete Arena article, which we announced a couple weeks ago. It includes footnotes and references and links that didn’t make it into the Arena version.
This is late, and it isn’t very Christmasy. But it came up as part of another project, and it’s been bugging us, so Bah Humbug. The following is a question from 2022 Mathematical Methods Exam 1. It’s been discussed some on this post, including a concerning rumour (edited 24/12/22), and we also hammered some of […]