| The TAL Project is initiated and granted by the Dutch Ministry of Education. The goal of the project is to describe longitudinal teaching-learning trajectories for mathematics in primary school. The trajectories offer a global overview of how education can stimulate the development of students' mathematical understanding in the grades K to 6. Intermediate goals that may function as landmarks for the road to the target goals at the end of primary school complement this overview. The learning-teaching trajectories are meant as a guiding tool for the macro-didactic tracking and as a framework for making macro-didactic decisions. They can, for instance, help teachers to enrich their use of textbooks. As such, they can contribute to the improvement of classroom practice and can give support to the teachers' professional development. Up to now, the project TAL has produced learning-teaching trajectories and intermediate goals for the topic whole numbers (grades K-6), and for geometry and measure (grades K-2). See http://www.fi.uu.nl/tal/talpublications.html for the publications. Current TAL project In August 2003 a follow-up TAL project has been launched, this time on rational numbers, as this is a subject where difficulties appear to be the most complex and urgent. In fact, research revealed problems in this subject area at the end of primary school, which in turn causes problems in the secondary education. Students find this topic difficult while teachers have difficulties coming to grips with the structure of this topic in text books. From the start onwards, teachers have been involved in the project, trying out core lessons and discussing and reflecting on the problems and key issues in this area. The core lessons are meant to both foster the discussion between teachers about the main issues, and to shed light on what those main issues are. Important points of attention for the project are the connections between the different manifestations of rational numbers - decimals, fractions, proportions and percentages - as well as the question of differentiation between students. |
