What is a half divided by a quarter?
Spoiler
This was a question that stumped nearly all 10-year-olds at Barton Hill primary school, the setting for Dispatches: Kids Don't Count. They're not alone. One fifth of children leave primary school without basic numeracy. But the most shocking fact that the documentary revealed is that many primary school teachers are also innumerate.
In a random test of over a hundred primary school teachers half of them got a half divided by a quarter wrong. That's an equation that hurts the brain. The easy part is the answer to the sum: two – that's how many quarters there are in a half. The infinitely more difficult question is what to do about the 50% of teachers who couldn't work that out.
In a random test of over a hundred primary school teachers half of them got a half divided by a quarter wrong. That's an equation that hurts the brain. The easy part is the answer to the sum: two – that's how many quarters there are in a half. The infinitely more difficult question is what to do about the 50% of teachers who couldn't work that out.
