This twenty-third ICMI Study, addresses for the first time in the history of ICMI studies, mathematics teaching and learning at the primary and pre-school levels. While the mathematics at this level is foundational, it is also complex in terms of the extent of interconnections, and in terms of the tensions between inductively derived and mathematical definitions that can both afford and constrain forward trajectories from these foundations. The international perspectives offered in this study bring these discussions to the fore, taking socio-cultural diversity and institutional constraints into account. The complexity of early mathematics led to a selection of a focus area for the discussion, with a number of questions connected to it: Whole Number Arithmetic (WNA), including operations and relations and arithmetic word problems.
This focus forms the core content of all primary mathematics curricula and the study of this core content area is often regarded as foundational for later mathematics learning. However, the principles and main goals of instruction in the foundational concepts and skills in WNA are far from universally agreed upon, and practice varies substantially from country to country. This ICMI Study provides a meta-level analysis and synthesis of what is known about WNA in ways that provide an important and useful vantage point from which to gauge gaps and silences and an opportunity to learn from the practice of different countries and contexts.