Teaching Number by Building on Students’ Strengths: An Investigation in Remote Australian Schools

Abstract

It is widely accepted that teaching should build on what students already know and understand. In this study, 42 Aboriginal children in Grades 3 to 6 were posed a series of related questions on addition and subtraction. The question items were posed in a one-on-one interview situation both in the context of money and with just numbers. The data revealed an alignment between the students' capacity to work with money and to work with numbers. This implies that money may be a useful context for beginning the development of number understanding and fluency in remote Indigenous contexts.