Background
Numerical ability
International concern about university nursing students’
numeracy skills has been ongoing for the last 25 years. For
example, a 5-year American study by Bindler and Bayne
(1984) carried out between 1979 and 1984 showed that up
to 38% of the nursing students each year were unable to
pass, at the 70% pass level, a basic ‘mathematics
proficiency exam’ consisting of addition, subtraction, multiplication
and division of whole numbers, decimals and
fractions. This result was confirmed 10 years later by an
Australian study carried out by Gillham and Chu (1995)
assessing the basic mathematical skills of 158 second year
nursing students. The students were given a test consisting
of ten common clinical calculations but only 55% were
able to answer them all correctly. The students had
particular difficulty with basic division and multiplication
of fractions. More recently, Brown (2002) found similar
results when he administered a basic numeracy test to 868
undergraduate nursing students across the United States of