Key Implications for Australian Primary Mathematics Education Go to Articles

 

The Australian Curriculum draft has been released this week (1 March 2010) and is making big news. Here, Calvin Irons analyses some of the implications for primary mathematics education.

What are some of your immediate observations regarding the planned Australian Curriculum found in this week’s draft?

1. There is clearly more content in Statistics and Probability compared to current state syllabi. We now see up to four of the following sub-headings: Data Representation; Data Investigation; Data Interpretation; Chance; Unequal Outcomes; Summary Statistics; and Variation in Years K–6.

2. The curriculum draft confirms that the timing of teaching the Number strand will be a significant adjustment for teachers in all state curricula. There is an earlier emphasis on whole number up to 1 million and on fractions up to Year 4. Decimals are now taught later, in Year 5.

3. Work with operations is used to reinforce place value understanding and vice-versa. One example of this is from the elaboration for place value in Year 3:
"justifying choices about partitioning and regrouping numbers in terms of their usefulness for particular calculations (e.g. it is helpful to think of 319 as 31 tens and 9 ones when calculating 319 – 46…) " (ACARA, 2010)


Read about a World-Class Curriculum for Australia

To read the draft curriculum visit the ACARA website. Full access notes here.

Update: June 2010
Consultation for the K–10 draft is now closed. The planned publication date is 1 September 2010