NUMERACY ACROSS ALL LEARNING AREAS

Numerate behavior can be thought of as the disposition and competence to use mathematics in the service of endeavors other than mathematics. Numeracy is linked to ‘what mathematics you know’, but it also involves the skills, thinking processes and attitudes needed to choose and use mathematics outside mathematics. In this sense, numeracy is about practical knowledge that has its origins and importance in the physical or social world rather than in the conceptual field of mathematics itself.

The major responsibility for developing students’ numeracy lies with the Mathematics learning area. At all levels, teachers of mathematics should help students learn to use their mathematics to solve practical problems and as a tool for learning beyond the mathematics classroom. Teachers of mathematics should also take responsibility for teaching students to read and write in situations that involve mathematical ideas, notations and visual forms.

However, the development of numeracy involves more than mathematics classrooms alone can provide, since its achievement requires working mathematically in a range of different settings. Indeed, school mathematics is unable to fully capture all that is numeracy simply because the mathematics is in mathematics. In order for them to be ‘numerate’, students must learn to connect the mathematics from situation to situation

– including across the school curriculum and beyond. Learning areas other than mathematics can, therefore, contribute to the enhancement of students’ numeracy by:

• providing rich contexts in which students can use their mathematics;

• expecting students to use their mathematics in other learning areas; and

• maintaining common and challenging standards. 

In The Arts learning Area, for example, students might consider what shapes they and others find pleasing. In doing so they are likely to use and also to enrich the language of shape and number developed in mathematics. Mathematics lessons might build upon this work on form, using the golden ratio as a starting point for considering ratios in general. Mathematics lessons could also involve students in trying to find out whether people actually do prefer particular shapes and forms, thus developing important ideas about data collection and handling and about the value and applicability of their mathematical work.

The Society and Environment and the Health and Physical Education learning areas may each call upon and enrich number, measurement and data skills when students investigate such matters as water wastage or rubbish generation and disposal in the school yard, their own fitness levels or adolescent health. The Society and Environment and Mathematics learning areas may also provide complementary work which develops an understanding of how three-dimensional space can be represented in two dimensions – as in various map projections – but never without some distortion, so that interpreting a two-dimensional representation requires an understanding of the features of the three-dimensional space that are and are not preserved in the two-dimensional representation.

The Technology and Enterprise learning area will also both draw upon and enhance students’ understanding of the representation of three-dimensional space in two dimensions. Indeed, the design and production of models involved in achieving the outcomes of Technology and Enterprise will draw extensively upon number,

measurement and space concepts and skills, and should also considerably enhance students’ learning in these areas by providing a broader range of contexts and experiences than could be provided in mathematics alone.

The Science, Society and Environment and Mathematics learning areas each contribute to students’ understanding of how time may be represented sequentially or in a linear fashion and of how the tracking and measurement of time relates to cyclical or periodic phenomena. These learning areas, together with the Languages Other than English learning area, can help students to understand that people may conceive of time differently and in culturally-specific ways. Thus, students can come to understand that the application of particular mathematical ideas to the measurement and recording of time is both influenced by and influences how we think about and experience time in our daily lives and in our myths and legends. The English learning area provides the language foundations essential for the learning of mathematics and the development of numeracy. Equally, developing students’ capacities to draw on a wide range of mathematical ideas in their reading and viewing generally is a major contribution of numeracy to English. English and mathematics together provide the basic information skills involved in reading the daily newspaper or a telephone book, and in preparing reports.

Thus, within each learning area, two questions should be asked:

• How can the learning area enhance students’ numeracy?

• How can numeracy contribute to enhanced outcomes in the learning area?

Answering these two question will require teachers to collaborate in developing common interpretations of numeracy and strategies to assist their students to use mathematics across and beyond the school curriculum.