ABSTRACT

Most of the people agree that to be successful in science at any non-trivial level some understanding of basic numeracy is required. People without numeracy skills suffered worse disadvantage in employment than those with poor literacy skills alone. The Department for Education and Science (DfES), in 2001, as part of the National Numeracy Strategy, gave a definition of numeracy which sets out what learners should be able to do by Year 9. Lenton and Stevens present a definition of numeracy based on the National Numeracy Project from 1995 that one can have little argument with. The National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics (NCETM) uses the term teaching for mastery arguing that the aim is to 'help pupils, over time, acquire mastery of the subject' which is surely what we all want regardless of the subject. Numeracy has been broadly defined to include not only skills and knowledge such as ratio and estimation but also graphicacy.