Does numeracy matter?
Today’s Maths4us guest post is written by JD Carpentieri, Senior Policy and Research Officer, National Research and Development Centre (NRDC) for Adult Literacy and Numeracy Institute of Education, University of London.
This is a post about strengths and weaknesses. First the weaknesses: maths skills and maths attitudes. Research (much of it from NRDC) shows that national numeracy levels are too low. This matters because maths matter. Adults with poor numeracy are less likely to be employed – for example, one major study of more than 10,000 UK adults found that between ages 16 and 34, men and women with poor numeracy skills experienced three times as much unemployment as those with good skills (Bynner and Parsons, 2006; Parsons and Bynner, 2007). The same study found that even when employed, those with poor maths were often trapped in insecure, poorly paid jobs, and were much less likely to receive work-related training or promotion. This often leads to a vicious circle, with poor numeracy leading to poor or no employment, which in turn contributes to declining maths skills, making it even harder to get a good job.
Despite the serious adverse impact of poor maths skills, attitudes to improvement tend to be underwhelming. Numeracy continues to be literacy’s ‘poor cousin’. For some adults, being ‘bad at maths’ or ‘not having a head for figures’ is not only not worth worrying about, it is something of a badge of honour. For others, there is a real fear of maths, or a sense of defeat, following negative learning experiences at school.
However, many adults do express a desire to improve their mathematical confidence and skills. One large study found that nearly half of women and more than a third of men with self-reported maths problems wanted to improve, whereas individuals with self-reported literacy problems were less eager.
If the UK suffers from a number of maths-related weaknesses, it also benefits from a conspicuous strength: the quality of the resources available to researchers and others seeking to improve understanding of the importance of maths. In particular, the UK boasts a world leading series of birth cohort studies. As The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee has observed, “Social scientists, geneticists, psychologists, demographers, medical researchers and epidemiologists flock here from all over the world, seeking answers to fundamental questions from [these] unique…studies. No one else has anything like them.”
The research cited in this post comes from one such resource: the British Cohort Study (BCS70), a longitudinal survey of thousands of babies born in one week in 1970 whose lives have been followed into middle adulthood. This cohort study is the focus of two new research projects being conducted by NRDC on behalf of NIACE as part of Maths4us.
The first project addresses the relationship between poor numeracy and employment, also taking account of access to and use of ICT. Using BCS70 data on maths skills, ICT and employment, this study will investigate the ‘digital divide’ and its links to numeracy. The study builds on earlier research looking at the relationships between ICT, employment and literacy. Whereas that earlier study focused only on outcomes from London the new study looks at the digital divide throughout England, Scotland and Wales.
The second new piece of research builds on a frequently cited motivation for adults to improve their maths: to positively influence their own children’s numeracy skills. Again looking at individuals in the 1970 Birth Cohort Study, but also including their children, this study will investigate the relationships between parents’ maths skills and those of their children and will again build on earlier research.
Through this work for Maths4Us we will generate evidence of how much maths matters to individuals and to society. It is hoped that this can be used to increase awareness of the need to support adults in improving their mathematical confidence and skills.
