Low-attaining secondary school mathematics students’ perspectives on recommended teaching strategies

Recent research syntheses have identified several potentially high-leverage teaching strategies for improving low-attaining secondary school students’ learning of mathematics. These strategies include the structured use of representations and manipulatives and an emphasis on derived facts and estimation. This paper reports on 70 semi-structured interviews conducted with low-attaining students in Years 9–10 (ages 13–15) in England. The interviews addressed the students’ perceptions of learning mathematics and the teaching strategies that they experienced and believed were most helpful. Many students reported rarely using number lines, not spontaneously estimating answers and being unfamiliar with derived facts. During the interviews, with minimal direction, students often showed that they were well able to make use of these strategies; however, they did not report making spontaneous use of them independently. We conclude that many of the most well-evidenced and recommended strategies to support low-attaining students in mathematics appear to be unfamiliar and unvalued, and we discuss how this might be addressed.