Supporting teachers in structuring mathematics lessons involving challenging tasks

Teachers’ Perceptions of Financial Literacy and the Implications for Professional Learning

“…Sullivan and Davidson (2014) found that students learn substantive mathematics content from working on challenging tasks prior to instruction from the teacher and are willing and able to develop ways of explaining their reasoning. In Sullivan, Askew, Cheeseman, Clarke, Mornane, Roche, and Walker (2014) results are presented that indicate that teachers welcome not only the particular lesson structure recommended to facilitate these outcomes, but also the ways that the suggestions for teaching and learning are presented.…”

Cost, price and profit: what influences students’ decisions about fundraising?

“…This article reports one aspect of the Encouraging Persistence Maintaining Challenge (EPMC) project, a large design-based research project involving mathematics education researchers from Monash University and Australian Catholic University (see Sullivan et al 2014;Sullivan et al 2016). Design-based research evolved out of the need to examine the potential of educational innovation within the reality and messiness of authentic classroom settings.…”

“…The terms Bfundraiser^, Braises^and Braise^are used consistently to infer profit. Students are presented with the amount This article reports one aspect of a larger design-based research project, the Encouraging Persistence Maintaining Challenge (EPMC) project (see Sullivan et al 2014;Sullivan et al 2016). As part of the EPMC project, more than 50 teachers and more than 1000 of their students in Victoria and the Northern Territory participated in online surveys, interviews, focus group discussions and classroom investigations.…”

“…Each financial dilemma was intended to be the focus of one 60-90-min mathematics lesson, with enabling, consolidating and extending versions of each task being available (Sullivan et al 2006). Financial dilemmas are intended to be taught using the launch, explore and summary lesson structure described by Lappan et al (2006) and Sullivan et al (2014). Launch refers to the ways a task is posed in the lesson introduction; the idea being that minimal instruction sets the expectation that students attempt a task by themselves.…”

“…In each focus group discussion, the researcher adopted a launch, explore and summary process (Lappan et al 2006;Sullivan et al 2014) to engage students in conversation about this financial dilemma. The task was introduced by saying, BI've got a problem here and there's probably more than one answer.…”