Eric.ed.gov – Making Maths Useful: How Two Teachers Prepare Adult Learners to Apply Their Numeracy Skills in Their Lives outside the Classroom

This pilot case study of two teachers and their learner groups from Adult and Community settings, investigates how numeracy teachers, working with adult learners in discrete numeracy classes, motivate and enable learners to build on their informal skills and apply new learning to their own real-life contexts. Teachers used a range of abstract and contextualised activities to achieve this. Similarities and differences between teachers’ approaches were analysed using a Context Continuum model. Whether teachers started with real-life situations then moved to the abstract mathematics within them, or approached it the other way around seemed less important than ensuring there was movement back and/or forth between the different discourses of numeracy and mathematics.