The theoretical work that went into developing these rubrics can be found in articles published in the National Numeracy Network’s journal: “Inspiring Transfer between Concrete and Abstract Thinking Spaces” .
or in Adults Learning Mathematics: “Quality Numeracy Tasks: Development and Stress Test of Three Rubrics for Teachers and Designers.”
Characteristics of high quality numeracy tasks that provided the first step in developing our rubric: High Quality Numeracy Tasks…
- are about concrete situations involving concrete objects and their relations, not about predetermined mathematical structures.
- must (as much as possible) take the student away from their ‘in class’ setting and place them in a context that is concrete ‘real world’ in nature.
- are formatted as close as possible to the way they would be presented in the concrete context they are about.
- are set in a context that is relevant and accessible to the student/program of study.
- require shifting from concrete to abstract (abstract to computable form… or mathematize/quantify concrete situation) or from abstract to concrete (interpret results)
- may involve computations. The computations/calculations are an important element of numeracy task completion, but can be done by computer or other means. The actual method used is not what the task is about.
After feedback we received from many attendees of OMCA in May of 2022, the NNN conference in Albuquerque New Mexico in the fall of 2022, and the ALM30 conference in Limerick, Ireland (summer 2023) we revised and reframed some aspects of the rubric. We are particularly grateful to Kees Hoogland who gave us an extensive and detailed series of comments and suggestions that along with comments of others informed this final(?) draft.
As you will quickly discern – we propose 3 rubrics – each one has a separate purpose – we have only stress tested the first 2. We have prepared a pdf version for download.
Please send all questions and comments to tgula@georgebrown.ca.