Effective teachers of numeracy

April 2003

Introduction

What factors help to make some teachers of numeracy more effective than others?

Askew, M., Brown, M., Rhodes, V., Johnson, D. and Wiliam, D.
School of Education, King’s College London

This study set out to identify and describe the characteristics of effective teachers of numeracy. It took place before and during the introduction of the National Numeracy Strategy.

The researchers were asked to feed back their findings into the development work for the strategy. They explored teachers' beliefs, knowledge and understanding as well as their teaching practice. They found that developing a rich network of connections between different mathematical ideas and using pupils’ reasoning to help establish these were most likely to result in greater pupil achievement and identified a range of other factors that contributed to effective numeracy teaching.

Now that secondary schools are also embracing national numeracy initiatives, this study unveils some of the thinking behind the introduction of the national numeracy strategy in primary schools. It helps demonstrate some important links between teacher understandings, teaching and learning that may help teachers to take a fresh look at their own practice in the light of their knowledge and beliefs about numeracy.

The researchers have built on these findings in a recent, large-scale longitudinal study into effective ways of improving numeracy standards. The report of this later study is not yet in the public domain but when it is available we will draw readers’ attention to it.

The case studies, which illustrate teaching and learning in classroom contexts, are not taken from the main study itself, but are independent studies from a number of other schools.

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