In the context of math education, students should achieve transferable understanding and skills that allow students to use math flexibly (such as understanding a percentage in a newspaper article), functional performance (such as being able to take medicine or use public transportation), and social knowledge (concepts necessary to interpret and make sense of the world). Social knowledge is based on mathematical concepts and important to know, regardless of whether the math is understood. Recognizing the importance of social knowledge has consequences for numeracy frameworks, teaching practices and student assessment. Measuring the learner's achievement can be done by testing or by performance of holistic tasks often presented in a portfolio of student work. Both the General Educational Development (GED) certificate in the United States and the Australian Certificate of General Education for Adults (CGEA) are used as measures of knowledge, but the GED and other certifications can distort good numeracy instruction. In numeracy education, the teacher has a responsibility to pass on the most significant mathematical social understanding of the world through real world examples. (Contains a chart, an example mathematical exercise, 3 teaching web sites and 13 references.) (SLR)