Developing Pre-Service Teachers' Understanding of Numeracy

In Australia, all teachers are expected to explicitly attend to numeracy in the subjects they teach. Pre-service teachers, therefore, need to begin to develop effective numeracy teaching strategies but there is a limited research base to inform the design of courses that address this need. This paper reports on findings from a study investigating the impact of one such course. The paper draws on data from two pre-service teachers: two course tasks completed at the beginning of the course and interviews conducted at the end of the course. Data were analysed using the 21st Century Numeracy Model. Findings suggest there were changes to the pre-service teachers' understanding of numeracy and their capacity to embed numeracy in the subjects they will teach.