When students’ reliance on a scientific or graphing calculator prevents them from being fluent in performing certain basic operations, such as factorizing a function, finding the zeros of a cubic polynomial, and standardizing a normal distribution from the Statistical Tables—ritually pressing a set of keys often conceals their poor understanding or mastery of these routines.
If only math teachers and tutors would implement the “No Calculators Allowed” rule, students would be manually forced to learn the routine or tedious steps in getting the answer to some intermediate step of a problem.
by MathPlus November 1, 2021