The effect of money as a context on the mental computation performance of students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9

This paper reports on part of a larger study that investigated the effect of a single context on students’ mental computational performance and strategy choices across a range of school ages in the Perth metropolitan area Money was the context and students’ prior experience with money was also considered Students were given the same mental computation test twice – once with the items in context and once without Despite many curriculum documents espousing the importance of teaching and learning mathematics in context, this study found that neither experience with nor use of the context of money had any effect at all, except in Year 3