3 Developing formal written calculation methods

This course mainly focuses on teaching children in the middle school years, so they have probably met all of the four rules (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and been taught formal methods of calculation. This does not guarantee that learners have learned these methods effectively! Nor is there any guarantee that if a learner can operate a method and get lots of right answers that they understand how the method works.

As a teacher, therefore, you are striving to teach effective methods, procedural understanding of how those methods work, and conceptual understanding of the mathematics which underpins the methods.