Real-World Task Context: Meanings and Roles

This chapter details results of a study intended to increase understanding of the myriad meanings of real-world task context in mathematics education and their relevance to modelling. The research aim was to ascertain how context is viewed within the broader mathematics education community. Data analysis reported here followed an examination of use of the terms: context, task context and real-world in four mathematics education journals. Four samples, one from each journal, two in 2014 and two in 2017 where all papers using the term real-world, comprised the purposive sample used for the in-depth investigation. Whilst, often not defined by the authors, in most papers the context was real-world task context and, in the majority, this played an essential, rather than incidental, role.