Dealing with large numbers: What is important for students and teachers to know?

Christine Chambris (1) , Frédérick Tempier (1)

1 LDAR (EA_4434) - Laboratoire de Didactique André Revuz

National French assessment shows difficulties with writing large numbers at the beginning of the 6th grade. But, what do students need to learn and teachers need to teach? What do they actually learn or teach? We investigate these questions at different levels of the didactical transposition: student knowledge, teaching practices and reference knowledge. We show a lack of mathematical understanding of large numbers and make a proposal for teaching knowledge which provides justifications for the use of large numbers which could foster a number sense understanding of such numbers.

Keywords: teaching; knowledge; Large numbers; units; numeration

Domains: History and Overview [math.HO]; Education

Christine Chambris, Frédérick Tempier. Dealing with large numbers: What is important for students and teachers to know?. Tenth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME10, February 1-5, 2017), Feb 2017, Dublin, Ireland. pp.322-329. ⟨hal-01724615⟩