Considers the mathematical needs of young employees. Interviewed both employees and their employers from a wide range of industry, commerce, and the public sector, and ascertained mathematics that is perceived by employers as being needed as well as that actually used by employees. Considers use made of commercial numeracy tests and makes…

Examined role of spontaneous gesture in 2- to 4-year-olds' counting and assessment of counting accuracy. Found that correspondence of children's speech and gesture varied systematically across age. Children adhered to one-to-one correspondence principle in gesture prior to speech. Counting accuracy related to correspondence of speech and gesture,…

Two experiments examined preschoolers' performance on test relying on the uniqueness principle for using evidence from a miscount in inferring a counterfactual cardinal number, with subtests probing associated number-skills. All the 5-year-olds and half the preschoolers passed the test. Results suggest that a crucial preschool step is to start…

This article aims to provide both an account and an assessment of the most significant policies adopted by New Labour on primary schooling since its victory in the election of 1997. A secondary intention is to determine what these policies reveal about New Labour and its political project. A key policy objective in New Labour's two terms of office…

From an early age young children actively engage informally in acquiring fundamental concepts and process skills that form a basis for mathematical understanding. Quite logically, questions will arise during planning when young children first encounter a more formal learning environment: what strategy should one use to develop mathematical …

Monitoring educational changes over many years is problematic when there are differences in curricula, the nature of the variables being measured, and the selection of participants. Rasch measurement techniques provide a procedure that enables each of these issues to be examined. Using archived and specially collected data, tests of numeracy…

In this article, the author argues that there is a big conceptual difference between number lines and number strips and that number lines should be consistently used as early as Y1. Her interest in the use of the number line as a powerful image of the real numbers, and how this is introduced in the early years, comes from her own experience as a…

If the goal is to promote mathematical thinking and help children become flexible problem solvers, then it is important to show students multiple representations of a problem. Because it is important to help students develop both counting-based and collections-based conceptions of number, teachers should be showing students both number line…

In this article, we provide an understanding of the term "numeracy" as it is used in Australia and a description of numeracy education in this country. In particular, we discuss the role of outcomes-based curriculum frameworks and outline the dominant teaching approaches. The focus is on students with learning difficulties and how they…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study that examines how a national reform introduced in England in the field of adult literacy, language, and numeracy is affecting teachers. The paper focuses on the use of a mixed methodology to explore teachers' attitudes to the reform and how these change over time. The quantitative strand includes the…

This article presents a new model of transcoding numbers from verbal to arabic form. This model, called ADAPT, is developmental, asemantic, and procedural. The authors' main proposal is that the transcoding process shifts from an algorithmic strategy to the direct retrieval from memory of digital forms. Thus, the model is evolutive, adaptive, and…

The purpose of the study was to explore the effectiveness of a program designed to improve the number skills of 5-year-olds. The program involved the withdrawal of children from the classroom in pairs to work with a specialist teacher using number books and games. Participants were 106 children who represented approximately the lower two-thirds of…

In this study, we use children's prior knowledge to support their development of cardinality understanding, based on Bermejo's (1996) model of cardinality understanding and on the distinction between cardinality (the number of items in a set is represented by a number-word) and the cardinality principle (the last number-word used in counting…

Background: Numeracy development is widely accepted as critical for adults in the general community which is equally the case for adults with Down syndrome. This paper reports some of the findings of a study including the research question: What is the justification for numeracy development for adults with Down syndrome? Investigating this…

Are abstract representations of number--representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated--a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a…