“Read the question carefully- What does this mean?” – Using metacognitive modelling to support children’s thinking in Maths

I am sure many maths teachers are familiar with the phenomenon of a number of children arriving in their classrooms each year very proficient in arithmetic, mathematically fluent in terms of calculation, and able to apply this thinking to numerical problems with confidence. However, these same children’s scores on reasoning papers and their confidence with reasoning problems is disproportionately low compared to their aptitude with number problems, even when they are more complex.