Abstract
Innumeracy, as understood here, is the inability to handle numbers and numerical data decently and to evaluate statements regarding sums and situations which invite mental processing and estimating. Innumeracy is quite frequent at primary school, as experience shows, and particularly, where open problems ask for numerical data to be supplied and substituted by the pupils themselves.
Innumeracy may be caused by a structuralist design of the instruction: from the beginning onwards, emphasis is on teaching the algorithms of column arithmetic, and no room is yielded to context problems.
The alternative, as here presented, to the structuralist approach is the realistic one. Here arithmetic starts as an informal context-bound activity of the children, who, via model situations, gradually develop more formal methods; these, in turn, remain tied to mental arithmetic and arithmetic by estimate, both in bare sums and in context situations.
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Treffers, A. Meeting innumeracy at primary school. Educ Stud Math 22, 333–352 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00369294
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00369294