A case-study exploration of the effects that context familiarity, as a variable, may have on learners' abilities to solve problems in Mathematical Literacy (ML)

Abstract

This study serves to explore the notion of context familiarity and how it affects the way learners perform in closed and open-ended problems in Mathematical Literacy (ML). The learners’ performances in this study are based on how well they were able to do the following: select the relevant data from the given tables; select the appropriate mathematics and execute them with precision; relate the mathematical solution back to the context in order to understand the problem better. The key findings indicate that more familiar contexts provide better opportunities for learners to: select the relevant data from given tables; select and execute the relevant mathematical tools; and relate the mathematical solution back to the context.