In this article, Jason Taff shares an approach that he presented to advanced seventh-grade prealgebra students. He begins by summarizing some of the shortcomings of equating the order of operations concept with the PEMDAS (often rendered mnemonically as "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally") procedure with the hope of helping teachers at…

When learning the order of operations, students are instructed to adhere to a directive when determining the numerical value of an arithmetic expression. A more typical approach is the use of a popular mnemonic called PEDMAS (parentheses, exponents, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction). The literature is scant on conceptual approaches…