On the Role of Inconceivable Magnitude Estimation Problems to Improve Critical Thinking

The use and potential of Fermi problems in the STEM disciplines to support the development of twenty-first century competencies

“…They argued that it is essential that students as citizens be able to interpret and respond critically to the barrage of numbers that they meet every day. Albarracín and Gorgorió (2015) showed how secondary students developed their own methods to solve real situation FPs and became more confident in their calculations and results than in the data reported in newspapers. Along the same lines, Carlson (1997) argued that FPs and the Fermi method offer opportunities for presenting contemporary problems to students and proposed the study of environmental problems related to fuel consumption, such as the consequences of changing large cars to smaller cars with lower fuel consumption.…”

Students Estimating Large Quantities: From Simple Strategies to the Population Density Model

“…Finally, a student accessed a website in English and realized that the differences may had been due to an incorrect translation of the word 'shrub', which confirms that other websites provided wrong figures. This final validation process strengthened the students' confidence in their learning and provided them with resources to have a critical point on information provided by the media (Albarracín & Gorgorió, 2015).…”

“…Another argument for the introduction of Fermi problems in the classrooms is the possibility to use them as a bridge between mathematics and other school subjects, introducing the students to different interdisciplinary tasks (Sriraman & Lesh, 2006). They are considered powerful tools to improve critical thinking (Albarracín & Gorgorió, 2015), in particular when checking the accuracy of computations with different governmental and corporate resources, as Sriraman and Knott (2009) suggest.…”

“…The research presented is a qualitative study of exploratory nature. We worked with a group of secondary students from which we had already collected data in a previous study (Albarracín & Gorgorió, 2015). The school is located in a city with a population of 200,000, within the metropolitan area of Barcelona, and the students mainly belonged to families with a middle socioeconomic status.…”

Un estudio exploratorio sobre el conocimiento del maestro para guiar actividades de modelización matemática en Educación Primaria

“…En primer lugar se ha elegido como actividad de modelización un problema de Fermi. Estudios previos ponen de manifiesto que los alumnos del ciclo superior de Educación Primaria (10-12 años) pueden resolver determinados problemas de Fermi trabajando en grupo utilizando estrategias que desarrollan por ellos mismos y que incluyen la creación de modelos matemáticos (Albarracín, Lorente, Lopera, Pérez, & Gorgorió, 2015;Peter-Koop, 2009). Uno de los aspectos no estudiados hasta el momento, y que conecta con la formación del profesorado, es el conocimiento del maestro de primaria para poder guiar una actividad de modelización matemática.…”