iResearch Ed

[Print-friendly version]

Improving numeracy: Co-constructing a whole school numeracy plan in a secondary school

Sue Mcdonald   

Yet as a priority "numeracy" is inadequately defined and the term is used to describe a wide range of notions. Many educators are unsure of what constitutes numeracy, unaware of how it differs from mathematics, and uncertain as to how its demands may be met in their planning and teaching. Secondary schools have few models upon which to develop a whole school numeracy plan. This study describes the journey of a secondary school staff as they developed a shared understanding of numeracy, identified the numeracy demands throughout the curriculum and planned for a whole school approach to address these demands.

Transcript

Interviewer: I’d like to welcome Sue McDonald to the interview this morning, Sue welcome

Sue Mcdonald: Thank you very much Nicola

Interviewer: Sue I wonder if you could please share with us what your Research Title is and just give us a brief explanation of the research that you’ve been doing?

Sue Mcdonald: Certainly, the title is Improving Numeracy Co-Constructing a Whole School Numeracy Plan in Secondary School, there hasn’t been a lot of research done in the secondary years, there’s been quite a bit done in the early years and middle years but the secondary seems to be in the too hard basket and that was of interest to me as I’m a secondary maths teacher.

Interviewer: How did you identify that there was a gap in the secondary and mathematic numeracy project?

Sue Mcdonald: My work at the moment is as an Education Officer in Mathematics with Brisbane Catholic Education so I work with about 30 secondary schools and it has become very obvious that children are not able to transfer their mathematics from the mathematics classroom to the other curriculum areas where it’s required and they also have some quite startling out of school numeracy demands in this day and age and children are not meeting those demands and the research also confirmed that there hadn’t been a lot of work done in this area so I thought well here’s something that I can link together with my work and maybe come up with something that can be used across other schools.

Interviewer: That’s absolutely fascinating, can you briefly outline your project and the major findings that you have discovered so far?

Sue Mcdonald: I basically work with one key case study school and I followed /?/ recommendations of conducting whole school audit and that comprised of questionnaires for staff to determine their attitudes and understandings about numeracy as opposed to mathematics, there was quite a large survey done of about 3,000 students in the archdiocese about their out of school numeracy demands to get some current up to date information on that and also at the case study school, the year 8 population of the case study school did two maths tests if you’d like to them that, one was a level 4 based on the new syllabus and one was level 5, just to get some base line data about what their ability was mathematically in that context and then they also did 6 numeracy tasks that were tasks that you would find probably in a science classroom, a home ec classroom, an art classroom that kind of thing to see firstly their disposition were they prepared to engage with the task and secondly how successful was that engagement.   So we collected a lot of data about the teachers and the students at the school as part of this numeracy audit, we then formed a working party with 6 key teachers in the school who were mainly Heads of Department of areas that had high numeracy demands so there was a Science Head, H & PE, SOS and then others as required and their first job was to audit the KLA syllabus documents to find out what exactly were the numeracy demands and come up with a document that illustrated all of those to make it very clear for staff.  We then audited the year 8 programs at the school to see where numeracy was explicitly taught in those subjects and we found it wasn’t at all and then we conducted some interviews with staff to determine professional learning needs so try to match up the numeracy demands in the syllabus documents to what they weren’t doing at school and to find out the reasons why to raise awareness and then to in service these teachers on well this is the actual mathematics behind what they’re doing so when you’re doing these line graphs in SOS, you can’t assume that the kids actually will transfer that knowledge from their maths classroom to your SOS classroom and you’ll need to teach it in that context.   The result of all of that work came up with a belief statement for the school which underpinned their whole school numeracy plan and that’s going to kick off next year at the school.

Interviewer: That is absolutely interesting and fascinating

Sue Mcdonald: Thank you

Interviewer: Are there any other implications that you have found that relate to education through your study?

Sue Mcdonald: I guess the main one is the teachers in other learning areas aren’t taught themselves the explicit mathematics that’s required so they don’t have a deep mathematical understanding and they do make assumptions so I think the findings of the learnings are for other teachers in other schools is identify the actual mathematics in your subject area which then is numeracy and plan for explicitly teaching that for the kids because they need experience in a number of context to actually make sense of it and to be able to use it in the future.

Interviewer: Thank you very much for that Sue, that was fantastic.

Sue Mcdonald: My pleasure, thank you.