The objective of this month’s Forum is to explore numeracy through the lens of numeracy tasks. Starting with an evolving rubric that we suggest could be used to assess the quality of a numeracy task, and thus inform teaching of numeracy, we will challenge the audience to evaluate the rubric’s effectiveness on several suggested tasks, which range from those that can be discussed with elementary school students to those appropriate for university students. Our invited speaker, Kees Hoogland (Utrecht), will bring us up-to-date on the present thinking about how we can better present numeracy tasks by replacing text with relevant visuals. As we break into groups after lunch, we will play with numeracy tasks to further discuss aspects of teaching and learning numeracy.

As background for the meeting, please have a look at the paper on the evolution of numeracy: “Evolution of Numeracy and the National Numeracy Network” (https://tinyurl.com/yc8csvwv). Recent paper co-authored by our invited speaker: “Word problems versus image-rich problems” (https://tinyurl.com/visnum).