Teacher guide Taking Off With Numeracy

TLF ID S7058

This teacher resource describes a numeracy intervention strategy for primary students identified as underperforming in mathematics in New South Wales. The Taking Off With Numeracy (TOWN) strategy focuses on professional learning to enhance teachers' knowledge and skills. Teachers are supported to assess each student's numeracy understanding, identify where their solution methods are breaking down, use a teaching sequence to move each student beyond the identified hurdle in learning, and monitor student progress against a research-based framework. The resource describes the results achieved, discusses the lessons learned and the next steps, and provides references to relevant readings.





Educational details

Educational value
  • 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.
Year level

3; 4; 5; 6

Other details

Contributors
  • Contributor
  • Name: Education Services Australia
  • Organization: Education Services Australia
  • Description: Data manager
  • Copyright Holder
  • Name: Commonwealth of Australia
  • Organization: Commonwealth of Australia
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.australia.gov.au
  • Publisher
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organization: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Description: Publisher
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.esa.edu.au
  • Resource metadata contributed by
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organisation: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: www.esa.edu.au
Access profile
  • Generic
Learning Resource Type
  • Online
  • Text
Rights
  • © 2014 Commonwealth of Australia, unless otherwise indicated. This material is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU) unless otherwise indicated. You may distribute, remix and build upon this material, provided that you include the acknowledgement '© Commonwealth of Australia 2014' and license under the same terms any new creations you have based on the material.