ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at standards of literacy; standards of numeracy; and the controversies surrounding both. Since the 1980s, successive British governments have been worried by poor standards of literacy and numeracy, by tabloid stories of 16-year-old kids 'graduating' from school barely able to read and write. The classroom is one of the most obvious places to study cognitive development. E. L. Thorndike argued that learning arithmetic was a matter of building up the strength of a large number of what he called 'habits'. T. M. McConnell compared the two methods of repetitive rote learning and a more 'rounded' approach using pictures and objects as learning aids. It's a measure of the fragmentation of the field that one new theory which uses some of Jean Piaget, some of Lev Semenovitch Vygotsky and some original thinking sits a little at odds with the rest of the field.
