Abstract
<p style="text-align: justify;">Numeracy is one of the essential competencies that the objectives of teaching math to primary students should be towards. However, many research findings show that the problem of “innumeracy” frequently exists at primary schools. That means children still do not feel at home in the world of numbers and operations. Therefore, the paper aims to apply the realistic mathematics education (RME) approach to tackling the problem of innumeracy, in the case of teaching the multiplication of two natural numbers to primary students. We conducted a pedagogical experiment with 46 grade 2 students who have not studied the multiplication yet. The pedagogical experiment lasted in six lessons, included seven activities and nine worksheets which are designed according to fundamental principles of RME by researchers. This is mainly a qualitative study. Based on data obtained from classroom observations and students’ response on worksheets, under the perspective of RME, the article pointed out how mathematization processes took place throughout students' activities, their attitudes towards math learning, and their learning outcomes. The study results found that students were more interested in math learning and understood the concepts of multiplication of two natural numbers.</p>
Highlights
Numeracy is the ability to comprehend and manipulate numerical data in everyday life
The study results found that students were more interested in math learning and understood the concepts of multiplication of two natural numbers
The paper will answer the following two questions: (1) Does the designed Hypothetical Learning Trajectory (HLT) generate an environment in which students perform mathematization to gain mathematics knowledge? (2) How does the designed HLT affect students’ understanding of the multiplication of two natural numbers? Researchers performed the study in three following stages
Summary
Numeracy is the ability to comprehend and manipulate numerical data in everyday life. Children’s understanding is not always manifest in their problem-solving activities (Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Siegler & Crowley, 1994) These manifestations in children lead teachers to consider children have not understood mathematics yet. Students at some primary schools mainly followed the model or imitated when learning four operations with natural numbers, and they did not understand the meaning of the calculation. They could read the whole multiplication table in sequence, but they could not find the result of any calculation in the table without reciting the table (Oanh, 2016)
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