Developing The Literacy And Numeracy Skills Of Secondary Students

Developing the literacy and numeracy skills of secondary students is a necessary part of providing students with a comprehensive education. Literacy and numeracy are essential skills for students to be able to engage with and understand the syllabus content in all subject areas. Given this, it is important for teachers in all subject areas to facilitate the development of students’ literacy and numeracy which also further supports students’ learning of the subject content. One such way is through the use of collaborative investigations. In order for collaborative investigations to be effective in developing students’ literacy and numeracy skills, the investigation must be structured in such a way that it incorporates both the features of beneficial literacy and numeracy development activities and the features of beneficial collaborative activities. When these features are present, the use of collaborative investigations to support the learning of subject content and development of students’ subject specific literacy and numeracy can be a very effective and beneficial

Although research has demonstrated that students assigned the same task rarely work collaboratively, this has been shown not to be true when collaborative tasks have been set in which teachers are clear about their expectations about how students should work together and suitable investigation tasks are assigned (Fox & Surtees, 2010, p. 58). Features of suitable collaborative investigation tasks are the provision of engaging and challenging problems and the modelling of exploratory discussion by the teacher prior to students being allowed to begin work on the collaborative investigation (Fox & Surtees, 2010, p. 58). When these features are present, there are significant gains in students’ ability to problem-solve, communicate mathematically and engage socially with their peers (Askew & Wiliam, 1995, pp.