"Location and Transformation" skills are critical tools for navigating the world and establishing foundational steps for geometric reasoning associated with co-ordinate grids and the Cartesian plane. The contextual nature of using local landmarks to understand students' mental representation of large-scale space has the potential to…

This paper reports on a study that examines the effects of problem context on students' performance. The performance of 151 Year 10 students on six mathematical problems was compared with the performance on fifteen variants with more and less context familiarity (CF) and engagement (CE) across levels of context use (LCU). The latter explanatory…

Despite an emphasis on manipulative algebraic techniques in secondary school algebra, many tertiary mathematics students have mastered these skills without conceptual understanding. A significant number of students with high tertiary entrance ranks enrolled in first semester university mathematics were found to have misconceptions relating to…

This paper reports how the context in which a mathematics item is embedded impacts on students' performance. The performance of Year 10 students on four PISA items was compared with performance on variants with more familiar contexts. Performance was not better when they solved items with more familiar contexts but there was some evidence that…

Upon beginning postgraduate research at the Faculty of Built Environment at UNSW, the authors were surprised to find themselves working in a library-like environment, where a culture of silence prevailed. Assuming initially that this was just how postgraduate research was, they soon learned that the building also housed a second postgraduate lab…