Numeracy Achievements 2023
Explicit Teaching of Numeracy
The explicit teaching of numeracy remained a focus in 2023 with Year 7 and 8 classes having a dedicated Numeracy lesson each topic as a part of their Mathematics classes programming. In these lessons, teachers focused on using the CUBES strategy to explicitly teach problem solving enabling students to improve their confidence, skills and mathematical resilience to solve multi-step, word-based numeracy problems. To support improved numeracy development, students engaged with higher order numeracy problems targeted to those involving multi-layer information, often using graphs and tables.
Whole school implementation of numeracy problem solving indicated that teachers were identifying numeracy opportunities within subjects across the school and explicitly teaching numeracy across the curriculum through the CUBES problem solving strategy. Teachers implemented a range of strategies and used the WBHS Numeracy Toolkit to support the whole school numeracy focus. His was supported through check-ins with teachers and student work samples. Some of the strategies that form part of our WBHS Numeracy Toolkit are shown below.
Numeracy Assessments
Students in Year 8 completed Check-in assessments for numeracy in 2023 in Term 2 and again in Term 4. Overall cohort performances indicated that students achieved above state levels for numeracy achievement and outgrew the state improvement between Term 2 and Term 4.
Year 7 students undertook Foundations testing in Term 1 and Term 3 to monitor fluency of basic operations. During 2023 the number of students demonstrating mastery of their times tables increased by 12%. Foundations testing data also showed that the number of students scoring less than 50% almost halved in all four mathematical operations.
