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Currently, my fifth grade teacher is teaching the students about converting both metric and customary units of measurement. She asked me the other day if she should require the students to memorize the relationship between the different units of measurement or if she can provide them with a conversion chart. As I read through the progressions, I shared with her that through the examples provided it seems that the students must develop an understanding of the relative size of a unit of measurement and how it relates to others. It also seems that students are expected to memorize metric system units and the common customary units of measurement conversions.
I want to make sure that we are addressing the requirements of the intent of the progressions and the standards, please advise. Thank you.Well, the standard 5.MD.1 simply asks students to convert … it doesn’t say whether they should memorize the relationships. That said, my own opinion is that there are some basic relationships that students should simply know, for example that there are 12 inches in a foot. It seems a waste of time to look this up in a chart when the human brain is already naturally adapted to storing such bits of information. Whether they acquire this by memorization or by repeated exposure is a matter of pedagogy, not specified in the standards. And the metric system is designed for ease of remembering.
Once you have a few basic facts, you can derive the others. For example, if you know there are 100 centimeters in a meter, you also know that a centimeter is 0.01 meters; it is not a separate fact, but a related fact coming from and understanding of the relationship between multiplication and division and an understanding of decimal notation.
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