It’s All About Logic! Building Mathematics Understanding into Career & Technical Education

It’s All About Logic! Logical, clear thinking is needed for professional practices across all disciplines. Students need math reasoning skills for making decisions in the everyday delivery of patient care.

It’s All About Logic! Students will need to prioritize tasks in whatever career choice they pursue. This math thinking model will help them to analyze situations using logical clear thinking.

Example Do you ever wonder why you sit in the ER for so long? Consider this. If a patient arrives with a child that has an ear infection, another has chest pain and EKG changes, a factory worker comes in with a minor laceration, and you arrive with flu symptoms………………. Who should be treated first? Why?

In order to figure that out you had to use logic. Logic Involves… Deductive thinking Inductive thinking

Deductive thinking Starts with true statements Facts logically point to true statements using logic to reach a conclusion Conclusion must be true

Inductive Thinking Starts with observations Assumption is that pattern will continue (conjecture) Conjecture may or may not be true You use inductive thinking to make educated guesses based on observations of patterns

Patterns Students should recognize: similarities and generalize patterns, use patterns to create models and make predictions, describe the nature of patterns and relationships, and construct representations of mathematical relationships.

Patterns Students should use mathematical models of patterns to make inferences, predictions and decisions. Example All men are mortal. Sam is a man. Therefore Sam is mortal Patterns enable students to describe and understand the physical world and to make informed predictions.

It’s All About Logic! A model could be a picture, table, equation, or any other method to represent a situation. Students should use models and create their own models in order to answer a question or draw conclusions about the situation that the model represents.