Numeracy Improvement

At Box Hill High School, we have a focus on improving all students’ ability in numeracy.  

 

"Numeracy is more than just the Maths curriculum, it includes the knowledge, skills, behaviours, and dispositions that students need in order to use mathematics in a wide range of situations” (VCAA, 2020).

 

Our goal is to improve students’ engagement in Mathematics and Numeracy.  We want all students to value mathematic learning and see the relevance to their own lives. We want all students to see the connections between what they learn at school and when they use mathematics outside of school.  We want students to be challenged at the right level and for all student to continue to grow in their numeracy ability. 

 

Our Mathematics teachers have been working closely with the Numeracy Improvement Team from the Department of Education to create student-centred lessons (based on Peter Sullivan’s Instructional Model) that allow students to develop their skills in reasoning and problem solving. These types of lessons promote active students and foster student collaboration, communication, justification and can be differentiated to suit a range of learning needs. 

 

Year 8 and 9 High Ability Students were part of a focus groups and were asked to give feedback on what they enjoy in their Maths classes and what they perceive helps them to learn.  It was very insightful and showed that students enjoy time to problem solve and collaborate.  Student feedback will be collected again at the end of Term 2 to see how they have engaged and learnt with the student-cenred lessons. 

 

Numeracy Improvement is an exciting focus for the school.

 

By Shareen Bottrell

Assistant Principal