RedGum Consulting - Numeracy Audit

The Numeracy Audit An audit is defined by one dictionary as 'an official examination of accounts'. The audit process outlined here is about teachers in a school examining their own ideas, documents and practice and then collaboratively deciding on future action. But it is a process that requires the teachers to make judgements about progress. It sets out some steps for teachers to collect and audit information about numeracy (as it relates to numeracy across the curriculum) and then to make judgements about the extent to which numeracy requires further action in the school and where that action should be directed. Thus, the Numeracy Audit has these main goals:
	to provide teachers with information about numeracy demands across the curriculum,
	to develop teacher's skills in recognising numeracy demands in their classroom and their curriculum,
	to support the school to make judgements about the extent to which numeracy requires action and where that action should be directed
	to extend teachers' knowledge of the strategies required to develop their students' numeracy.
The Numeracy Audit will provide teachers with information relating to many of the following questions.
	What is numeracy and numerate behaviour? Do staff have a common view of numeracy?
	What is the school doing with regard to numeracy? How do our curriculum documents refer to numeracy? How do our own teacher documents refer to numeracy? Are students being provided with enough opportunities to develop numerate behaviour?
	How well are our students developing numerate behaviour? In the classroom how well are students responding to tasks that make numeracy demands on them? Are they responding fluently where expected? Are they using their numeracy to learn - about the mathematics? about the context? about the strategic? Are they being constructively critical of the mathematics they use? What do our students think numeracy is? Do our students know how to go about improving their own numeracy?
	Is this good enough? What should we do more of? less of? start doing?
Steps involved in a Numeracy Audit
A comprehensive audit would include a number of the following tasks and requires someone or a small team to be trained in conducting the review:
	Find out staff and students' views on numeracy.
	Collect and analyse school and curriculum documents for how numeracy is described.
	Teachers review their own curriculum documents for numeracy references.
	Collect examples of what actually happens in the classroom.
	Discuss and identify issues that arise from reviewing the information collected. Develop a plan of action to improve student numeracy.
	Professional development (such as that described by The Numeracy Research Circle) in numeracy and research skills.
The Numeracy Audit: An Overview PDF Format

J. Hogan (2000)

Copyright John Hogan 2002.
This document may be copied if it is not included in documents sold at a profit.
Hogan, J (2002) see heading of the page. (On-line).
Available at http://www.redgumconsulting.com.au/num_audit.html