Numeracy across the curriculum in Australian schools:teacher education students’ and practicing teachers’ views and understandings of numeracy

In this article, we confront the challenges to teacher education students and practicing teachers raised by the concept of numeracy and its place in the curriculum. In the Australian Curriculum, there is an expectation that teachers at all grade levels and in all subject areas develop students' numeracy capabilities. At Monash University, a public, research-intensive university, the largest university in Australia, graduate level teacher education students are now required to complete a course entitled Numeracy for Learners and Teachers. We describe the content of this course and, from an online survey, report findings of the impact on students'understandings of the relationship between numeracy and mathematics, their confidence and numeracy performance, and their readiness to incorporate numeracy in their teaching. Using a similar online survey, we also examine practicing teachers’ confidence about their numeracy proficiency, their views on how numeracy and mathematics are related, and provide a snapshot of the teachers' actual numeracy capabilities. We discuss the implications of our findings