The use of tasks and examples in a high school mathematics classroom: Variance of purpose and deployment.

This is an action research study into the uses of tasks and examples in a senior high school mathematics classroom, in which the teacher is the researcher. Investigating a teaching style that seemed to be highly examination-oriented, the study focuses on purposes and intentions behind the uses and deployment of tasks and examples within a problem-solving framework. The investigation reveals expected as well as unexpected teaching strategies employed to facilitate and expedite student learning, including the use of deliberate overloading, creation of dissonance, partial understanding, and atypical sequencing and progression of curricular material. The primary result of the study is a breakdown and classification of examples and problems in terms of their contexts in classroom teaching and teacher intention.