Quality Numeracy Tasks: Development and Stress Test of Three Rubrics for Teachers and Designers

The development of a set of rubrics for teachers and curriculum designers interested in the quality of numeracy tasks emerged from our struggle with an attempt to clarify the distinction between numeracy and mathematics. Shifting our perspective from asking what numeracy and mathematics are to asking what they are about led to the conceptualization of a core mandate for numeracy scholarship and a recognition that a distinct feature of numeracy tasks is that they aim to inspire transfer from concrete to abstract thinking spaces and back. Next, we used models of the thinking process for real-world problem solving developed by Verschaffel, Greer, & De Corte (2000), Burckhardt (2008), Blum and Ferri (2009), OECD (2017) and especially Wolfram (2020) to shape the development of Rubric 1 and 2 for discerning quality numeracy tasks. These models helped break down the idea of transfer from concrete to abstract thinking spaces and back into well-defined thinking actions. We then added a third rubric that aims to help teachers decide whether to use a particular numeracy task in their classroom setting. In a conference workshop at ALM 30 (in 2023) we presented the rubrics and a series of tasks from a variety of settings as tools to help with the stress test. This paper first outlines the background and rationale for numeracy tasks as a distinct type of mathematics task, then presents an updated and scaled down version of the three rubrics, demonstrates them in action with a series of distinct mathematics tasks, and reports on what we learned from stress testing.