Numeracy equipment and Year 3 children : "bright, shiny stuff" or supporting the development of part-whole thinking?

New Zealand teachers' use of equipment has increased as a result of their participation in the Numeracy Development Project. The purpose of this study was to discover how closely the children's reasons for their equipment choices matched their teachers' reasons for including the same pieces of equipment in their numeracy programmes. In the teachers' reasons for equipment choices, the surface features of equipment seemed equally important as the conceptual development the equipment can support. In contrast, the reasons given for equipment choices by the 34 Year 3 children who were interviewed were almost exclusively concerned with how the equipment might help them to solve the given problem. The children's success rates at solving the problem declined as the equipment became more structured; this paralleled the teachers' equipment choices. The equipment choices of the four teachers interviewed in this study were not strongly consistent with the equipment use recommended in the NDP materials.