Socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged students are not equally exposed to mathematics problems and concepts at school. Exposure to mathematics at school has an impact on performance, and disadvantaged students' relative lack of familiarity with mathematics partly explains their lower performance. Widening access to mathematics content…

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…

Research has demonstrated that instruction that relies heavily on studying worked examples is more effective for less experienced learners compared to instruction emphasizing problem solving. However, the guidance associated with studying some worked examples may reduce the performance of more experienced learners. This study investigated…

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…

Teachers are often unaware that bilingual students often switch between their languages when doing mathematics. Little research has been undertaken into this phenomenon. Results are reported here from a study of language switching by sixteen Year 4/5 Iranian bilingual students as they solved mathematical problems in an interview situation. Reasons…