The Numeracy Recovery program has been funded mainly by the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust. It involves working with 6- and 7-year-olds who have been identified by their teachers as having problems with arithmetic.
These children are assessed on nine components of early numeracy. The children then receive weekly individual intervention (half an hour a week) in the particular components with which they have been found to have difficulty. The interventions are carried out by the classroom teachers, using techniques developed by the researcher.
The teachers are released (each teacher for half a day weekly) for the intervention, by the employment of supply teachers for classroom teaching. Each child typically remains in the program for 30 weeks.
The components tackled in the project are counting procedures; counting principles; written symbolism for numbers; understanding place value; word problem solving; number fact retrieval; derived fact strategy use; arithmetical estimation; and translation between arithmetical problems presented in concrete, verbal and numerical formats.
The children in the intervention group have so far shown very significant improvements on standardized tests.
Ann Dowker
University of Oxford