ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is an applied research and development project in children’s early arithmetical learning. This project, known as Mathematics Recovery, draws in a very significant way on the early number research program undertaken in the 1980s at the University of Georgia (e.g. Steffe et al., 1983; Steffe and Cobb, 1988). In Mathematics Recovery, theory and methods which resulted from the research program in early number are applied by teachers at the lower elementary level. These teachers have undertaken or are undertaking a professional development program focusing on specialist teaching to advance the arithmetical knowledge of low-attaining first graders. Mathematics Recovery was developed during the period 1992 to 1995, and involved twenty teachers in eighteen schools in the north coast region of New South Wales, Australia. Since January 1995, Mathematics Recovery has been implemented on a significant scale in school districts in the southeast of the United States (Wright et al., 1998) where approximately eighty teachers have undertaken the Mathematics Recovery professional development program. Since 1996, teachers in two local education authorities in the United Kingdom have also undertaken this program. In New South Wales, since 1996 Mathematics Recovery theory and techniques have been adapted as the basis of a systemic, large-scale, classroom-based project which has involved several hundred schools and thousands of students across all forty educational districts in the state (Bobis and Gould, 1998; Stewart et al., 1998). Finally, in New Zealand in 1998, Mathematics Recovery theory and techniques have been adapted as part of a major nationally funded project, the first phase of which involves seventy-two teachers.
