1. What is the evidence based numeracy research telling us? Centenary Professor Tom Lowrie Queensland Numeracy Summit 2015, 16 June

2. Trends in Australian students’ mathematics Australian middle-school students’ content knowledge performance has declined in past 10 years, from a high international standing. Performance of students from other countries (including UK and US) have increased. These countries now have similar performance measures. * Australia statistically different from UK & US

3. Trends in Australian students’ mathematics Australian students’ mathematical literacy performance has also decreased, from an earlier high standing. Is this a Western phenomena? * Australia statistically different from UK & US ^ Australia statistically different from UK or US

4. Declines in mathematics student performance In part, due to distinct performance cohort differences Males > females: = 4 months of a school year > 6 months for spatial reasoning tasks Accounting for SES, school location and sector matter: Independent > catholic > state Metropolitan > regional > remote Gap between highest and lowest quartiles = 28 months of schooling

5. Decline in mathematics teacher standards? Perception: Recent cohorts of teachers have lower levels of mathematics content knowledge (MCK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) than past cohorts. Mostly anecdotal or causal

6. Decline in mathematics teacher standards? Moderate positive correlation MCK- PCK Primary teachers > secondary teachers Engineer PCK ≈ pre-service PCK

7. Decline in mathematics teacher standards? Source: Barrington, F., & Evans, M. (2014, July 22). Year 12 mathematics student numbers 2004-2013. Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI). Retrieved 1 December 2014 from: http://maths.org.au/index.php/78-publications/education

8. Numeracy: The ‘new’ standard? Are teachers with higher PCK more effective teachers of numeracy? Pre-service teachers who have studied more advanced levels of mathematics do not posses different beliefs or attitude constructs than those teachers who studied more basic courses. Today’s teachers (and indeed their students) may need to possess different mathematics tools than in the past.