ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand how to help learners grasp core mathematical concepts and it analyses the opportunities for developing learners’ mathematics skills, knowledge and understanding in teachers subject. It seeks to understand some ways of developing positive attitudes to mathematics in learners. Learners have a variety of views about what mathematics is, and of their relationship with it. In mathematics, learners need both ‘procedural fluency’ and ‘conceptual understanding’. Learners might interpret a distance–time graph comprising straight-line segments as a journey that goes up and down hills. Alternatively, misconceptions might arise where learners have experienced poor, or limited, explanation on the part of the teacher. Work across the school curriculum draws on different aspects of learners’ graphing skills and the need to recognise and apply these skills appropriately. Learners can draw their own informal representations, for example: when the situation calls for sharing a quantity in a given ratio, or dealing with the mathematics of a mechanical or technical situation.
