Developing and implementing digital Numeracy Screeners

Evidence from across the globe has demonstrated that early numeracy skills are strong predictors of later educational and life outcomes, such as health and employment status. At the same time, it is well documented that not all young learners acquire foundational numeracy skills and knowledge prior to the onset of formal education.

The reasons for this learning gap are manifold and include, among other factors, lack of informal educational opportunities and lack of numerical activities and stimulation in the home environment. This means that a substantial proportion of young learners undergo the critical transition from informal (e.g., Kindergarten) to formal (Elementary school) without foundational building blocks of numeracy. This is important because in math education later skills and knowledge build on early foundational skills. Therefore, when children lack foundational skills in math, they are likely to continue to fall behind their peers with solid and fluent foundational skills. How can the gap between children with and without foundational numeracy skills and understanding be closed?

One critical step is to identify those young math learners who are most at risk of falling behind. To do this, educators often use screeners. Screeners are evidence based, rapid assessments that can be easily administered in the classroom to either individual students or the entire classroom. While evidence-based screeners for literacy have become a commonly used tool for educators that inform instructional practice, there is a scarcity of similar screeners for early numeracy and math. In view of this lacuna, with significant input from our partners in the education sector, my research team and I designed a paper-and-pencil ‘Numeracy Screener’ (www.numeracyscreener.org). For over 10 years this tool has been available free of charge and has been downloaded by over thousands of educators and researchers across the globe. As part of this process, we have been working closely with educators and researchers to better understand how we can improve our screener. This process has led to the recognition that a digital screener would be significantly more practical in terms of cost, usability, student administration, data entry and data management.

In view of this, we are now in the process of creating a digital Numeracy Screener which builds and significantly improves upon our widely used paper and pencil screener. A prototype of our digital screener can be explored here: www.numeracyscreener.com. A digital screener will allow educators and learning scientist to screen large group of students, easily retrieve their data (with a high level of granularity) and monitor and visualize student progress over time to inform instruction. We believe that we at a critical juncture where we have a viable tool which we aim to develop further, implement, and iteratively refine with our educational partners. This will put us into a position to be able to release a free, evidenced based tool for educators and researchers across the globe. We believe our Numeracy Screener will allow more young learners to succeed in numeracy and mathematics.

Open-source protocol: www.numeracyscreener.com

Sample publications:
McDonald, J., Merkley, R., Mickle, J., Collimore, L., Hawes, Z. & Ansari, D. (2021) Exploring
the implementation of early math assessments in Kindergarten Classrooms: a research-practice collaboration. Mind, Brain & Education, 15(4), 311-321.
Hawes, Z., Merkley, R., Stager, C.L. & Ansari, D. (2021) Integrating numerical cognition research and mathematics education to strengthen the teach and learning of early number. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(4), 1073-1109.
Hawes, Z., Nosworthy, N., Archibald, L. & Ansari, D. (2019) Kindergarten children’s symbolic comparison skills relate to 1st grade mathematics achievement: evidence from a two-minute paper-and-pencil test. Learning and Instruction, 59, 21-33.