| | March 20208CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONWhen I was in grade school in the 1960s, I learned to convert fractions into decimals. The examples in the text book were baseball batting averages. Being an avid baseball fan, I took to the lesson like a duck to water, and began calculating batting averages for me and all my friends as we played together. To this day, I know that 1/7 is .143, and I've often amazed people that I know instantly many fractions to three decimal places. I wonder, however, for those students who did not follow baseball, if this arithmetic lesson was drudgery? Would examples in their area of interest have produced a better understanding of the lesson?One of my colleagues, a Southerner born and bred,once shared with me that while he was studying economics at Michigan as an undergraduate, he had a perfect score on a microeconomics exam except for one question that he left blank. He told me his economics professor asked him, "John, why did you leave that question blank?" John told me the question was "what is the effect on the supply of bagels if the price of lox goes down?" John explained, "I had no idea what a lox was and how it could have anything to do with a bagel. Now if the question had been about chitlins or boudin or ambrosia, I would have been able to answer." How many students don't `get' examples or cultural references in lectures or exams?Context ­ so important for learning. Many students are dutiful, and spend the time necessary to understand ADAPTIVE LEARNING TECHNOLOGYBy Garrett Bozylinsky,Eastern Connecticut State University
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