Maths education

This article focuses on the diagnostic interview used as part of the Numeracy Development Project to assess students’ mathematical knowledge and strategies. It looks at changes in the instructions to teachers about the basis on which judgments about each student’s global strategy stage are made, and looks at the process of categorising children’s solution strategies, using different criteria to make the judgments. 

Six UK secondary schools investigated whole-class interactive teaching of mathematics, identified its key characteristics, and put it into effective use in their own classrooms.

This is the second of two articles in this issue of set based on some of the major findings from the survey of classroom assessment practices in English and mathematics at Years 5, 7, and 9 carried out by NZCER in November 2001. The first article briefly described the methodology and outlined the assessment tools and strategies commonly used by teachers. This article examines the section of the survey which asked how useful teachers found the tools and strategies for providing information for teaching and learning, for students, and for school management.

In November 2001, NZCER conducted a survey of the English and mathematics assessment practices of teachers at Years 5, 7, and 9.

Research into mathematics education has highlighted that many students struggle to develop an appropriate understanding of the equals sign. When over 300 students at a large intermediate school were asked to demonstrate their understanding of the sign by solving a simple equation, more than half interpreted it incorrectly. This article considers why a mathematical understanding of the equals sign is important, and suggests some strategies that can be used in the classroom to help learners establish its meaning.

 The quality of teacher feedback to students has a considerable impact on student achievement. This research evaluates the quality of feedback given to primary students during numeracy lessons.

The focus of this article is the strategies that young children use to find the volume of rectangular prisms. Children were observed during teaching sessions and their solutions to follow-up assessment tasks were analysed. Some implications for the teaching of volume to young children are presented.

Which learning experiences promote proportional reasoning? Here is a piece of equipment which can be integrated into lessons when dealing with ideas involving fractions, decimals, and percentages.

The author describes a study in which videotaped interviews from the NEMP project were analysed to see how children explained their answers to questions involving the commutative (“changing the order”) properties of addition, subtraction and multiplication. Many of the children, having grasped that “turn-arounds” worked in addition, incorrectly applied that same reasoning to subtraction. Asking students to explain their understanding of why number properties such as commutativity “hold good” helps them to apply those concepts appropriately in a variety of contexts.

A research project looking at Māori student participation and achievement in science and mathematics education examined four junior secondary school programmes that targeted Māori in these subject areas. Students and parents were found to prefer activity-based programmes, provided they dealt with contemporary activities and topics of interest to the students.