Considering student experience and knowledge of context in planning mathematics learning

Abstract

In this study, 42 Australian Indigenous children were posed a series of related questions on addition and subtraction. The questions were posed both in the context of money and without any context. The data revealed an alignment between the students’ capacity to work with money and to work with numbers. The money context did not increase the cognitive load or task complexity suggesting that relevant contexts can be used by teachers to support mathematics learning.