Chinese and Australian primary students' mathematical task types preferences: underlying values

This paper reports on part of a study which investigated the mathematical task type preferences of Grade 5 and 6 students from Victoria, Australia and Chongqing, China. Through the administration of a questionnaire to 1109 Chinese and 689 Australian students, it was found that across the topics of Number and Geometry, tasks situated within a contextualised situation were the most preferred, whilst the other task types were preferred differently between the two topics. Based on the reasons provided by the students, underlying values for the most preferred task types could be suggested. For the topic of Number, each of the three task types appeared to be most preferred for reasons which are encapsulated by the following values: 'challenge', 'multiple solutions', 'real life problems' and 'easiness'.