Teaching with tasks for effective mathematics learning

By Colin Foster. Journal of Research in Mathematics Education, 2013

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There has recently been increased interest in the research and development of task design within mathematics education. This follows the production over time of theoretically-informed materials and approaches such as those from Realistic Mathematics Education (De Lange, 1996), Connected Mathematics (Lappan, Fitzgerald, Feyl, Friel, & Phillips, 2009) and the Centre for Research in Mathematics Education at the University of Nottingham (also known as the Shell Centre) (Swan, 2006). In this book, Sullivan, Clarke and Clarke make an important contribution to the growing literature on mathematics tasks as they outline the findings from their three-year project Task Types in Mathematics Learning, in which they worked with grade 5 8 teachers from three varied clusters of primary and secondary schools in Victoria, Australia. They describe a wide variety of different mathematical tasks and their observed effects in the classroom, how teachers’ pedagogical practices were informed through the process, and insights from the students. They also report on a subset of their teachers who took responsibility for designing and teaching extended sequences of lessons. All of the authors’ research is ‘‘based on an assumption that choice of tasks and the associated pedagogies are key aspects of teaching and learning mathematics’’ (p. 14) and that ‘‘the nature of teaching and what students learn are defined largely by the tasks that form the basis of their actions’’ (p. 57). In line with other researchers in this area, they see tasks as fundamental to all mathematics classroom activity. The authors ‘‘use the term task to refer to information that serves as the prompt for student work’’ (p. 13), and the study focuses on three task types:

Subfields: Education, Statistics and Probability

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