Designing Tasks to Promote and Assess Mathematical Transfer in Primary School Children

This study aims to design learning situations and tasks that promote and assess the capacity of primary school children to transfer mathematical knowledge to new contexts. We discuss previous studies investigating mathematical transfer, and particularly the strengths and limitations of tasks used to assess transfer in these studies. We describe some pilot tasks that were used with upper primary children and provide some responses to teacher prompts. We describe some design principles for the construction of tasks and an associated categorisation of prompts that might be used as the basis of further research into mathematical transfer.