Taking Off With Numeracy

• This resource may be useful in supporting the mathematics learning area. It describes a teacher professional learning strategy that was found to improve numeracy learning and confidence for students in years 3-6 who had been assessed as having numeracy learning at or below the national minimum standard. The program provided teachers with explicit guidance. The emphasis was a teaching sequence to develop student place value understanding due to its importance in written problems, the four operations, decimals and measurement. Attention was also given to multiplicative relationships.
• This resource might assist teachers in addressing many aspects of the Numeracy general capability. It points out that in attempting written numeracy problems 50 to 60 per cent of student errors occur before students reach the process skills level, yet most remediation programs focus on process skills. The initiative described in this resource aimed to support teachers to understand each student's thought process to identify where their solution methods in mathematics were breaking down. It provides references to further readings relevant to primary numeracy.

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