Teachers

What is Numeracy?

Early Numeracy Skills

Why Assess Pupils Informally?

Site Layout

The Check-Ups Tests

Marking and Recording

Follow-Up

What is Numeracy?

Although definitions of numeracy vary, it is typically understood to mean the ability to use appropriate mathematical knowledge, skills and experience whenever they are needed in everyday life.

The relevance of mathematics to everyday life cannot be over stressed. A child or adult lacking the basic skills and concepts in mathematics will encounter problems in simple tasks and activities such as shopping, playing games and measuring objects for cooking or home improvements.

Early Numeracy Skills

Early numeracy skills, like early literacy, are an important component of school readiness and are an everyday part of even very young children's lives.

Some of the most important numeracy skills for young learners are

• Recognition of size, shape, and patterns.
• Ability to count verbally (first forward, then backward).
• Recognition of numerals.
• Ability to identify more and less of a quantity.
• Mastery of one-to-one correspondence (i.e., matching sets, or knowing which group has four and which has five).

Why Assess Pupils Informally?

Informal assessment is as important for learning as formal assessment.

• It is embedded in the teaching and learning process of which it is an essential part.
• It shares learning goals with pupils.
• It helps pupils to know and to recognise the standards to aim for.
• It provides feedback which leads pupils to identify what they should do next to improve.
• It has a commitment that every pupil can improve.
• It involves both teacher and pupils reviewing and reflecting on pupils' performance and progress.
• It involves pupils in self-assessment.

Site Layout

All of the web pages have a navigation bar at the top. There are links to the six main sections of the web resource: index, parents, teachers, check-ups, links and downloads. The index, parents, teachers, links and downloads sections contain information on that particular topic, while the check-ups section contains links to the test pages. Some instructions on the tests are given on each test page, and there is a short animation showing how to complete a test on a separate help page.
There are two games a student can play, while taking a rest between tests. At the end of a test the teacher can see the students score and also which choices were selected in each question.

The Check-Ups Tests

There are eight tests in "Check-Ups" These are:

• Compare. Comparing the number of objects in pictures using the vocabulary "more" and "less". (1-9)
• Data sort. Comparing and sorting data under a variety of categories that are relevant to the study of mathematics, such as; shape, colour, common objects and number.
• Equals. Selection of the correct picture to correspond with a given numeral. (1-9)
• Measure. Pictorial questions to assess understanding of basic vocabulary terms of measurement.
• Money. Identification of the common euro coins up to €2.
• Number. Selection of numerals to correspond with the written numbers. (1-9)
• Shape. Identification of two dimensional shapes: circle, square, rectangle, triangle, parallelogram, trapezium, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon and octagon.
• Time. Identification of time (..o'clock) on analogue clocks.

Marking and Recording

At the end of each test the number of questions done correctly appears as a pop up message. It is also possible to scan the test to find out which choices were selected in the incorrect answers. This is useful because it gives the adult supervising the test the opportunity to note the areas of the topic that require further work.

Follow-Up

You may decide to devise a plan of intervention for a pupil, based on the resources you have in your school.There are also links to a number of programs to download, based on the same topic areas that are tested in "Check-Ups". These are either freeware or shareware. Some of these download in the form of compressed or zip files, so it is necessary to have a file extraction program such as WinZip installed on your computer to install the software properly. These programs are, mostly, educational games
The links page has a list of sites that provide general information on mathematical topics, homework help, worksheets quizzes and free software.