About our Work
The Numeracy Centre was established in 1999 as an interfaculty unit in the Academic Development Programme with strong ties to the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics.
The goals of the Numeracy Centre are:
- To assist the university with ensuring that students and graduates are quantitatively literate in a manner that is appropriate for their course of study and intended role in the community.
- To promote acce ss to and foster success in quantitatively demanding programmes of study.
These goals are addressed through designing and delivering quantitative literacy courses and interventions, through providing teaching staff with professional assistance and by contributing to testing for selection and placement purposes. We believe that researching our practice will improve our ability to achieve these goals.
Our objectives contribute to the Academic Development Programme mission statements and goals:
- To promote continuing transformation in the student body by developing, implementing and disseminating educational strategies that facilitate equity of access and outcomes.
- To promote quality of outcomes and responsiveness to contemporary conditions in UCT's degree programmes by providing the faculties with professional educational services.
- To offer leadership, professional support and specialized teaching in providing for the development of key academic skills and literacies (language development and numeracy) in mainstream curricula, both as tools for learning and as graduate outcomes.
- To facilitate access for talented but disadvantaged students by providing a developmental selection testing service, expertise in entry-level assessment, and foundational courses that enable such students to succeed in making the transition to higher education.
- To facilitate equity of outcomes, and thus overall improvement of completion rates, by developing effective extended curricula in the main undergraduate programmes in all faculties (the main challenge here being to ensure that mainstream courses can successfully address diversity in educational background).
- To facilitate continual improvement in the quality of teaching and learning in mainstream degree programmes through professional contributions to curriculum and course design and the development of teaching approaches that are effective in the UCT context.