Every tag in the EHEapp has a breakdown into numeracy, literacy and socialisation elements. You may be wondering what these are and how we decide on the amount of each element to assign to a particular tag.
The first thing to understand is that there’s nothing particularly clever going on here – we are not at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence! This is just good old fashioned working things out the hard way. We wanted the elements to roughly reflect the frequency of something your child has done. So for example if you add an archery tag the app records that your child has done archery once and the archery element of #archery is a rather unsurprising 1.
Likewise, if your child has done some maths the app says they’ve done maths once and the maths element of a maths tag is again 1. 1 simply equates to doing something once.
Now the question we then ask is how much numeracy is in each of these activities. The latter is fairly easy because maths is simply an abstraction of numeracy so we say that if they’ve done maths once they’ve also done numeracy once, that is the numerical element of maths is 1.
But how about archery? How much numeracy is there in archery? If doing maths counts as doing numeracy once then what’s the element of numeracy in archery? Well archery has targets with scores and an awful lot of addition and cumulative totals when arrows hit those targets; so it’s fair to say there’s a lot more numeracy in archery than say going for a walk. So if going for a walk counts as doing no numeracy and maths counts as one element of numeracy we know that archery is somewhere in between.
This is where we bring in cooking, our go-to activity for calibrating both numeracy and literacy. We use cooking because it’s the perfect mix of literacy and numeracy. There can be a lot of numeracy in cooking; admittedly, on average, not as much as maths but certainly more than both archery and walking. So we have assigned cooking with an element of 0.5 for both numeracy and literacy and we use it to calibrate all the other activities. The argument here is that cooking twice is roughly equivalent to doing maths once with respect to numeracy which the cooks amongst us will know feels about right.
So let’s get back to archery, archery definitely has a greater element of numeracy than walking, so it’s greater than zero; it’s also fair to say that on average it has less numeracy than maths so we know it’s numeracy element is less than one. So the next question we ask is, on average does it have less or more numerical content than cooking. The fact is cooking encompasses many more numerical concepts than those found in archery. So given that archery is less numerical than cooking we’ve narrowed it down to somewhere between 0 and 0.5. Given that in general archery only encompasses addition but it does so consistently we then assign archery a numeracy element of 0.2. What this means is that if you did archery five times then on average the amount of numeracy done would be equivalent to doing maths once.
Now, as we said, this isn’t rocket science. One could argue over whether it should be 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 but in fact it doesn’t actually matter. Your child can do a maths lesson and take in absolutely nothing; in fact many children do years and years of maths lessons and would still struggle to score an archery tournament. All this shows is that there are no absolutes in education; all these elements are actually showing is a rough guide to the amount of numeracy, literacy and social there were in the activities your child has been doing. Whether they retained any of this is a completely separate issue and brings in the idea of progress.