understanding and help them think about their learning.
6 Descriptive rather than negative judgements.
7 Involvement of the pupil.
Theoretical implications
8 A socio-cultural view of learning (see Chapter 2).
9 An intention to teach in the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1986).
This acknowledges children’s partial knowledge (Athey, 1990).
10 A view of assessment as accomplished jointly by teacher, child and family.The problem with worksheets
Mathematics worksheets have dominated and still do dominate many classrooms
from pre-school upwards. They come in all shapes and forms from being teacher-
made to workbook pages in published schemes. They are popular in nearly every
country that can afford paper. The USA uses the words ‘ditto sheet’ and there they
have special shops called ‘Parent Teacher Stores’ that are abundantly stocked with
copy masters. Worksheets are seldom used in some European countries. Selinger
argues that schemes have controlling material that decides what should happen next
and what pathways of learning should be encouraged (Selinger, 1994). They gener-
alise for all children and they provide a dependent culture for the teacher as well as
the child. Anghileri is concerned that schemes often introduce set procedures and
formats (Anghileri, 2000). The children see calculations as ‘rituals’ which leads to
little understanding of the signs and symbols used.
In our large-scale study of teachers’ beliefs and practice concerning children’s ‘written’
mathematics, we investigated how Early Years settings (3–8 years) supported children’s
mathematical representations. We found that, of the sample of 273 responses, work-
sheets were used by 77 per cent of teachers. It is alarming to note that of these, 72 per
cent of teachers with 3–5-year-olds used worksheets. Once children reach 6-years-old,
100 per cent of teachers in this study were using worksheets (see Chapter 1).
Pound discusses the prolific use of worksheets in Early Years settings. She puts the
view that ‘worksheets are seen by many Early Years workers and parents as being an
indication of a formal and somehow more productive educational process going on’
(Pound, 1998, p. 13). She says that the suppliers suggest that, amongst other things,
the sheets may be used to introduce the child to recording. Pound strongly refutes this
idea by saying that the restricted format of the worksheet does not encourage the chil-
dren’s own meaning but sets a ‘straitjacket’ which hampers their own drawing and
writing (Pound, 1998). Fisher agrees with this: ‘worksheets restrict what a young child
can tell you about what they know and understand. If children devise their own ways
of recording knowledge and understanding, then they will select ways which make
sense to them and give all the information they want to share’ (Fisher, 1996. p. 59).
Our questionnaire study of the way teachers supported early written mathematics
and children’s written methods revealed that the reason some teachers used work-
sheets was for assessment purposes. We would question the value of worksheets as
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