Abstract

Arithmetic skills are important to a population composed mainly of farmers and stockbreeders who must constantly buy and sell. However, these producers may encounter difficulties in learning operations like multiplication and division in a classroom, because they are used to mental arithmetic from their daily market experience. This project will identify the most appropriate means of furnishing rural adults with a written arithmetical capacity sufficient for their everyday needs and design a manual, training program, and evaluation system for future users.

Post-Project Summary

Researchers interviewed 145 people in five regions, and gave them mathematical exercises to resolve mentally. This was to determine the mental processes illiterates used in performing calculations and make recommendations for classroom teaching strategies. It was found that the illiterates mainly decomposed numbers to mentally add, subtract, and multiply, but did not follow any specific rules. This contrasted with written arithmetic in that specific rules existed for calculating numbers in columns from right to left. Illiterates, however, often calculated in columns from left to right instead, and therefore made more errors. Researchers concluded that the root of the problem of teaching illiterates arithmetic in the classroom lay in the education levels of the instructors at the literacy centres. Based on their observations, they formulated an arithmetic teaching handbook consisting of three sections: writing numbers; classification tables, including grouping numbers into quantities such as a dozen; and arithmetic operations. It was noted that the handbook was being pilot tested during the project.

Recipient Institution(s)