Our questionnaire focused on two key aspects. We asked:- Do you give children worksheets for mathematics?
- Do you give children blank paper for mathematics?
We also asked teachers to give examples of the sort of things the children might do
either on worksheets or on blank paper (see Chapter 5).
When planning our questionnaire we hoped that the findings would provide us
with information about adults’ expectations and the opportunities that children had
to represent their mathematics. In doing this we made a mistaken assumption: we
thought that using blank paper would provide children with the sort of open oppor-
tunities that we believed would help them make their own meanings. When we
analysed the responses we were very surprised by the results (see Chapter 5).
Our responses were gathered during a one-year period, from 273 teachers in four
areas of England. Three areas were large cities: one in the north of England, one in
the west and one in the south-west. The remaining area was a largely rural county
in the south of the country. We had been interested to discover if teachers’ practice
was different in large, inner-city areas when compared with the mainly rural county,
but this was not the case (Worthington and Carruthers, 2003a).Worksheet use
What was evident was the large difference in use of worksheets when comparing dif-
ferent types of Early Years settings and classes with different ages of children (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1 Results of the questionnaires
Type of setting Percentage using worksheetsMaintained nursery classes 20
Private nurseries 63
Pre-schools (voluntary) 72
School classes with 4/5-year-olds 89
School classes with 4–6-year-olds 100
School classes with 7-year-olds 100
School classes with 8-year-olds 100Children in maintained (state-run) nursery classes appeared to be freer in terms of
their mathematics, whilst voluntary run pre-schools made the greatest use of these pub-
lished materials for children under 5 years of age. Once children arrived in school – in
England this is generally at the very early age of 4 years old – almost 90 per cent of
teachers use worksheets and by the following year every one of the teachers in our study
used worksheets. Four-year-olds who were in mixed-age classes with 5–6-year-olds were
more likely to use worksheets than children in classes of only 4- and 5-year-olds. Our
findings are consistent with what Millet and Johnson observe is a ‘world-wide trend’;
‘typical teaching is assumed to be the total or significant use of a commercial mathe-8 Children’s Mathematics8657part 1b.qxd 04/07/2006 18:05 Page 8