The Development of Everyday Mathematics in Brazilian Children with Limited Formal Education

The Purchasing Practice of Low-Income Students: The Relationship to Mathematical Development

“…Brenner's (1998) contributions to the understanding of children's purchasing were focused on describing scripts and currency knowledge links to classroom curriculum rather than describing specific supports and constraints related to children's purchasing. Although there is some similarity with the findings of the Guberman (1996) investigation of Brazilian children's purchasing strategies, my work reinforces the need to examine the relationship of strategies and the particular types of problems that emerge in practice. Whereas Guberman's (1996) work focused on children's common or model strategies as they related to task difficulty, my work highlights the importance of examining children's changing strategies as they relate to unique task demands.…”

“…Although there is some similarity with the findings of the Guberman (1996) investigation of Brazilian children's purchasing strategies, my work reinforces the need to examine the relationship of strategies and the particular types of problems that emerge in practice. Whereas Guberman's (1996) work focused on children's common or model strategies as they related to task difficulty, my work highlights the importance of examining children's changing strategies as they relate to unique task demands. Many students did not use common or model strategies consistently across purchasing behavior; rather, the particularity of task difficulty or complexity (e.g., number of items, total cost of items) was related to the strategy that children used to make the purchase, making broader categorizations of more or less complex when comparing shopping task less explanatory.…”

“…An example of the dollar-as-one strategy for List C was demonstrated by Student 212, who provided a one-dollar bill and a quarter, calling the collection "twenty-six." Here the child used the 25 of 25¢ and the one of one dollar as if they 398 TAYLOR 2 Many of the purchasing strategies were consistent with those described in Guberman (1996). Global correspondences were similar to idiosyncratic, and covert calculation was similar to total, but because of differences between the tasks that children were provided and the marked difference in the type and value of currency used in these two countries, different strategies were possible.…”

“…Many students did not use common or model strategies consistently across purchasing behavior; rather, the particularity of task difficulty or complexity (e.g., number of items, total cost of items) was related to the strategy that children used to make the purchase, making broader categorizations of more or less complex when comparing shopping task less explanatory. In fact, Guberman's (1996) description of strategies as more or less efficient must also be considered in light of its efficiency for a particular type of purchasing task.…”

“…Although there is a long tradition of in situ studies that document the mathematical practices of children (e.g., Carraher, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1985;Guberman, 1996;Saxe, 1988a), research describing the ways in which children from the United States use mathematics in their daily lives is quite limited, particularly with regard to African American children (for general exceptions, see Brenner, 1998, andRogoff, 1995; for an African American exception, see Nasir, 2000). Of the absence of literature, Ladson-Billings (1997) wrote, "Certainly enough literature documents the mathematics failure of African American students.…”