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ensure accuracy. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and
School tory becomes clearer as one explores outstanding teaching
in other disciplines. As is the case in history, most people
believe that they know what mathematics is about—computation.
Most people are familiar with only the computational aspects of
mathematics and so are likely to argue for its place in the
school curriculum and for traditional methods of instructing
children in computation. In contrast, mathematicians see
computation as merely a tool in the real stuff of mathematics,
which includes problem solving, and characterizing and
understanding structure and patterns. The current debate
concerning what students should learn in mathematics seems to
set proponents of teaching computational skills against the
advocates of fostering conceptual understanding an