Oxford University programme improves children’s Mathematical Reasoning
Many children struggle with numeracy (mathematics), and fall behind their classmates at school. A programme being rolled out by consultants from Oxford University is helping Year 2 children make an additional three months’ progress in mathematical development in comparison to children who did not use the programme.
Mathematical reasoning is a core competence for attaining mathematical literacy which is, in turn, increasingly recognised as a cornerstone of education and a life skill. Defined by the OECD as the capacity to identify and understand the role that mathematics plays in the world, mathematical literacy also empowers individuals to make well-founded judgments and to enable individuals to be constructive, concerned and reflective citizens.
But how do we develop mathematical reasoning in children to ensure these aims are realised? This was the question that concerned Terezinha Nunes and Gabriel Stylianides of Oxford University’s Department of Education, and led to the development of the Mathematical Reasoning programme, as part of their “Reasoning First” research.
Terezinha, of the Child Development and Learning Research Group, and Gabriel, of the Subject Pedagogy Research Group, designed the Mathematical Reasoning programme for Year 2 to promote children’s quantitative reasoning and understanding of the logical relations between numbers. Children are taught to organise relations between quantities as they think about concrete situations and to use mathematics to represent these situations. Through the mathematisation of situations, the programme involves young children in modelling and checking the models they use – it has been shown to have a positive impact on pupils, equating to three additional months’ progress in mathematical development in comparison to children who did not use the programme.
The Mathematical Reasoning programme includes online games, classroom exercises, training materials and guides, and has been successfully delivered by teachers trained in a face-to-face format. However, in order to make an impact at scale, an online course for teachers was developed to enable teachers across the country to access the training, also affording flexibility in time and place of training, so that teachers can fit the training into their busy schedules. Terezinha, Gabriel and their team have been working with the Education Endowment Foundation to develop this online programme to allow teachers to use the Mathematical Reasoning programme effectively in their classrooms. Two development projects have been funded by the Education Endowment Foundation through the Department for Education’s Accelerator Fund. The end result of the projects, facilitated by the Consulting Services team at Oxford University Innovation, will be an online course for teachers, who will then be able to implement the programme in their classrooms.
The first project, completed in 2022, developed the online course, including videos of lectures as well as videos of trained teacher leaders working with children to model activities that teachers will use in the classroom. The programme materials were also updated so that the online mathematical games for the children are compatible with current technology. The second project, which is currently underway, is to evaluate the usability of the course as teachers trained by the online course implement the programme in 30 schools. This includes obtaining teachers’ testimonies about the effectiveness of the course in preparing them to deliver the Mathematical Reasoning programme to their Year 2 classes with confidence. The project will provide a test of the online model for rolling out the programme to a large number of schools.
