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)

De Menezes, Joao Alexandre2012-03-072012-03-072012-03-07http://hdl.handle.net/10539/11395M.Sc., Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, 2011This 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.enMathematics, study and teaching (elementary)Mathematical literatureMathematics, problems, exercises, etcA case-study exploration of the effects that context familiarity, as a variable, may have on learners' abilities to solve problems in Mathematical Literacy (ML)Thesis