Opening access to numeracy: Public goods to support mathematics teacher professional development

• In Event: Highlighted Session: What do math teachers need to help their learners succeed? Research and insight on teacher professional development

Proposal

Learning outcomes in numeracy are very low. For example, early-grade math assessment trends from Ghana in 2013 and 2015 show students doing poorly beyond the most procedural and recall items (RTI International, 2015). In one district in the province of Punjab, Pakistan, only 32.2% of these students were able to do a set of foundational numeracy tasks (one task each on spatial orientation, shape recognition, measurement, and number recognition, as well as at least three simple number operations) (ICAN, 2020). Similarly, in Tanzania in 2013, only 7.9% of second grade students met the addition and subtraction benchmark at the end of the school year, with girls lagging behind boys (7.3% vs 8.5%) (RTI International 2016).
Given the attention that has been paid by donors and governments to reading in the past decade, there is greater knowledge around how to improve literacy instruction in low-and middle-income country contexts, as well as tools to support this work, than for numeracy. What tools do exist are often difficult to access and it can be difficult for practitioners to know which are of high quality or appropriate for their context. At the same time, there is ample evidence that numeracy is equally important to literacy for both future success in school, as well as day-to-day needs (Tredoux & Dawes, 2018; Duncan, Dowsett, & Claessens, et al.,2007); . In fact, there is evidence that numeracy may be a greater predicter of school success, including literacy and numeracy outcomes later in life, than literacy.
Given the importance of foundational mathematics teaching and learning, an effort has been made of the past two years, under the Science of Teaching program, to identify and develop public goods that may be of use to practitioners and policy-makers seeking to develop effective programs for improving math teaching and learning in the early grades. Beginning with a series of listening sessions with math education experts involved with advising on, contributing to, or developing interventions, the development team was able to narrow its focus on development a set of mini-modules for teacher training that focus on key math domains/topics where teachers and learners often have difficulty. These modules, currently in process, will take advantage of existing resources – reviewing and curating the best ones, while filling in the gaps and providing a structure that allows for easy access and a step-by-step module. The modules will focus on developing teachers own content knowledge while also developing pedagogical content knowledge. Once the modules are completed, and prior to the conference, the team will work with 2-3 sites (ie, existing interventions) to field test these new modules. The presentation will discuss the development of these modules, provide an orientation on how they can be accessed and used, and present findings from the field-tests.

Authors

• Annie Savard, McGill University

• Brittany Meredith