Can research help clarify the aims of mathematics instruction in primary school?
• What role does technology play in mathematics instruction? Recent Research Results Do variations in children’s knowledge at the time of initial school entry affect how much they learn from instruction? When children start school, they already have some knowledge of numbers and quantities, learned without formal instruction; this knowledge is known as informal knowledge. For example, some children know how to count only below 10, others can count way up into the decades: they differ in their counting skills. Many children can solve simple arithmetic problems with small numbers: for example, Carpenter and Moser (1982) found that pre-school children aged 4-5 years gave about 80% correct answers to problems known as combine problems, such as “Jane has 3 dolls and Mary has 4. How many dolls do they have altogether?” The children’s success was due to their informal knowledge of quantities: they represented 3 and 4 with objects or fingers, and then counted these as a single quantity. So man
