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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHaving taught many classes of primary\/elementary students, I have taught my fair share of lessons on the Order of Operations<\/strong>. To me, the rules for applying operations in the correct order are not that difficult:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason for having these rules, of course, is so that we can all agree on the value equal to an expression with multiple operations. Otherwise, we would have ambiguous situations, which would be highly inconvenient, to say the least. For example, how should we evaluate the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2 + 5 x 7 = ___<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apparently, this question caught the interest of a lot of people on Facebook, and many felt the need to respond (which was the whole idea, of course). I guess almost all adults learned to answer questions like this at school, and over 6000 who saw it were confident enough in their abilities to answer it in public. I presume they believed they were correct with their answer, and in fact several backed up their numerical response with comments emphasizing that they believed with great confidence that they were correct:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most amusingly (or worryingly), even those who were incorrect often tried to justify their responses:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seeing the huge number of responses I thought it would be interesting to analyze them to see just how good today\u2019s Facebook users are at primary \/ elementary level arithmetic. The results were, to say the least, disappointing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n All up, out of the sample of 865 responses which were analyzed, just 25.8% of responses were correct. Of the three-quarters of incorrect responses:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have some ideas about why this little experiment found just 26% of Facebook users who saw and responded to the question could answer it correctly. What do you think? Are we teaching the order of operations badly? Should we even bother to teach it, since it seems not to be successful?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leave a comment below to say what you think:<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently posted the following graphic on my Facebook page: Having taught many classes of primary\/elementary students, I have taught my fair share of lessons on the Order of Operations. To me, the rules for applying operations in the correct order are not that difficult: Process whatever is in brackets first (applying later rules if necessary) Apply \u201cother\u201d operations … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/November-4th-2012-2.jpg\")
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My intention with the Facebook post was to generate interest, attract people to \u201cLike\u201d the page, start conversations, and so on. My Facebook page at that time had around 150 people who had \u201cliked\u201d it, and I was used to seeing around 100 interactions a day on the page. I was unprepared for what happened in the following 2 weeks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/profpete.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/BOMDAS_graph1c-540x304.jpg\")
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