Primary School Estimates The Status Of Teaching The New Curriculum Studies

As the science and technology progressing, the tools of calculating are popularizing day by day and people's computational mode and idea has changed significantly. Many precise computations which originally need pencil and paper now have been replaced by other computational tools. Therefore it is especially important to judge whether the answer obtained by computational tools is correct and reasonable or not. Today the question we face is to determine when the precise answer is needed and when estimation is enough, as well as to judge if the result gotten by mental computation, pencil and paper or computational tools is right or wrong through computational estimation. The ability of computational estimation has already been one kind of abilities which are valued in the current international elementary school mathematics education. In July, 2001 our country promulgated "Mathematics Curriculum Standards for the Full-time Compulsory education (Experimental Manuscript)"in which added the content of computational estimation and set the request in the concrete goals. Because the mathematics teaching in the elementary schools of our country always only valued precise calculation, therefore the teachers lack the experience of teaching computational estimation. The new turn of the curriculum reformation started from the experimental plots has already entered the comprehensive implementation stage gradually; the key point of the research had gradually shifted from determining the goal of the curriculum reform, formulating the new curriculum standards and compiling the new textbooks to implementing the new curriculum.This article studied the teaching of computational estimation in the elementary schools of our country from two aspects of teacher and student through many research methods such as classroom observation, questionnaire survey, talking and so on. Obtained some conclusions as follows:(1) Teachers have certain understanding to the computational estimation, but some teachers lack the elementary knowledge of the method and strategy of computational estimation and can not understand the function of the computational estimation comprehensively;(2) Teachers can not understand the goal of the teaching of computational estimation sufficiently; many teachers think that how to estimate is the goal of the teaching of computational estimation, they do not pay great attention to the ability of problem solving using computational estimation;(3) Teachers lack the judgment standard to the estimate result, the majority of teachers think the estimate values which approach to the precise value are all correct, but lack the judgment standard to the degree of "approaches";(4) Students can estimate according to the request and has certain ability of computational estimation, but the ability has some difference, especially for the four grade students;(5) Students do not know all the methods of computational estimation. The majority of students can utilize the methods of "Rounding" and "Clustering", but cannot utilize the method of "Compatible Numbers" which suits to the multiplication and the division estimate;(6) Many students are accustomed to the precise computation, so the students' ability of using computational estimation to solve problems waits to be improved.In view of the problems which exist in the teaching of computational estimation, we put forward the following proposals: Firstly, "The Standard" should propose the grade standard of computational estimation explicitly; Secondly, the teaching materials should introduce the correlated contents of computational estimation comprehensively; Thirdly, the teacher training should emphasize the content added in the new curriculum; Fourthly, in the process of teaching, teachers should pay great attention to raise the students' ability to solving problems using computational estimation.