Our research

We started by studying the maths skills and confidence of trainee science teachers. We asked them to mark GCSE science questions that used maths skills and then asked them how confident they were about their answers. Less than 20% marked all 8 questions correctly and two thirds were confidently wrong! Almost half of trainees marked worse than if they had guessed randomly.

This causes real problems in the classroom - children need their work to be marked correctly by teachers who understand the skills that they are teaching. We know that the vast majority of teacher training courses don't assess maths skills and that there isn't consistent support to develop these essential skills.

We're tackling this with more research that looks at what interventions work. We're recruiting more trainee teachers for another study, this time testing particular interventions. This will let us show teacher training providers the evidence they need to solve this problem.