Conquering the LANTITE: Exploring digital mathematics instruction & test taking strategies using a cognitive multimedia framework based portal

In 2015, all Australian education ministers agreed that from 1 July 2016 the Government would initiate the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE), designed to verify that all prospective teachers could demonstrate the literacy and numeracy skills required in their profession. The LANTITE quickly became another hurdle for educators and could be the most influential gatekeeper ever implemented in Australian Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs. Institutions, therefore, instigated support programs to help their students pass the LANTITE. This paper describes once such intervention which is modelled on the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and is designed for a context where students were placed at a distance and required self-learning approaches. This digital mathematics portal showed a significant improvement in students' ability to pass the LANTITE. The paper also identifies a set of guidelines for future portals, allowing students to measure their knowledge, using flexible picture and video resources, providing the ability to flexibly absorb content in small chunks, and giving students effective testing strategies in addition to content knowledge. Future work will look at how these strategies can be implemented and extended, specifically, for students who have a history of failing the test in the past.