The connections and contradictions in student responses to contextualised tasks

This study examines the responses of vocational students in three Further Education Colleges to a range of contextualised tasks. It provides some insight into their perceptions of the relevance of a these "realistic" tasks to their lives. Seventeen small focus groups of students from the vocational areas of Construction, Public Services and Hair and Beauty were each shown three unfamiliar contextualised functional mathematics tasks from a bank of ten.