We describe an exercise for introducing undergraduate students to the practice of assigning tasks to followers and illustrating that proper task assignment is contingent on context. Students are assigned the roles of "manager" or "employee," and managers instruct employees how to create a penholder out of Mega Bloks® using only…

This study examines how a group of bilingual ninth grade algebra students discussed two word problems stated in terms of "real life" contexts. Using a lens of mediated action (Wertsch, 1998), the analysis reveals two distinct ways that the problem contexts influenced the group's mathematical reasoning. In one problem, the problem context…