26 June 2002
Education Minister Trevor Mallard today announced more success for the new way of teaching maths in schools.
He told primary school principals meeting in Wellington that the evaluation of the Advanced Numeracy project shows an
overall increase in student achievement.
“Students became more sophisticated in their mathematical thinking. Teacher attitudes towards maths - and the teaching
of it - improved. Furthermore, student attitudes towards learning maths were improved as a result of their teachers
participating in the project,” Trevor Mallard said.
“The ability of teachers’ and schools’ to communicate about maths teaching and learning was also vastly improved. The
next stage is to look at case studies of successful numeracy teaching in low decile schools, compared with those that
aren’t so successful. We hope this will allow us to gain an understanding of how to make sure everyone shares the
gains.”
The Advanced Numeracy Project is for maths professional development programme for teachers of year 4-6 pupils. It leads
on from the successful Early Numeracy Project involving 40,000 primary school children – which has also been a stunning
success story.
“There’s a real upward trend now in literacy and numeracy. It started with Count Me In Too back in 2000, then the
National Education Monitoring report in 2001 which showed big literacy gains. So far in 2002 we’ve had ENP and now this
Advanced Numeracy Project”.
The research report, written by Dr Joanna Higgins of Wellington College of Education showed that over the 15 weeks of
the Advanced Numeracy Project the students, from 90 schools the length of New Zealand, made gains in all six measured
categories. These ranged from addition and subtraction to fractions and whole number identification. The improvements
signal that most children made the vital transition from counting based strategies to part-whole thinking.
“The results have exceeded Ministry of Education expectations. I have asked the Ministry to ensure that all teachers of
years four to six classes have opportunity to undertake the ANP professional development programme by 2005,” Trevor
Mallard said.