| Title: | Back to basics? - There's more to the 3Rs than meets the eye |
| Authors: | Nunes, T
Bryant, P
Howes, C |
| Affiliation: | TLRP |
| Publisher: | TLRP |
| Issue Date: | Nov-2008 |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2428/48302 |
| Additional Links: | http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/research/resgroup/cl/
http://www.tlrp.org/dspace/handle/123456789/1489 |
| Type: | Other |
| Language: | en |
| Description: | National curricula and guidance for teaching English and maths in primary schools across the UK have not paid enough attention to important aspects of both subjects – to children’s cost. A project in England called The Role of Awareness in the Teaching and Learning of Literacy and Numeracy in Key Stage 2 has shown that learning about morphemes can help children’s spelling and vocabulary. It also found that looking at fractions in terms of sharing helps KS2 pupils to grasp their relative nature. (For instance, four people each get ¼ of a pizza when it is divided evenly). If children don’t learn about ‘intensive quantities’ such as speed, density and value for money in primary school, they are likely to have problems with them for the rest of their lives. 5-14 Mathematics in Scotland: the Relevance of Intensive Quantities found ways to teach this difficult topic. The research found the following findings and implications: 1F) Children’s difficulties with the spelling of many words can be reduced by making them aware of the morphemes in them; 1I) Primary schools should systematically teach about morphemes and their role in spelling. 2F) Teaching programmes can make a difference to children’s understanding of fractions if they start from pupils’ intuitions about sharing and establish connections to fractions as numbers; 2I) Initial and continuing teacher education should make teachers aware of pupils’ intuitive understanding of the logic of fractions and the situations in which they are understood most easily. 3F) Children’s difficulties with intensive quantities are primarily conceptual. Two or three hours of teaching can boost their understanding; 3I) Teaching needs to focus upon problem-solving strategy. No major upheavals to the primary curriculum are needed. |
| Keywords: | literacy
numeracy
spelling difficulties
teaching morphemes
problem-solving
intensive quantities |
|
| Appears in Collections: | Numeracy/Mathematics
Literacy
|
| Files in This Item: |
| File |
Description |
Size |
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| Back to basics.pdf | | 2140Kb | Adobe PDF | 
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