3.5.4. Decontextualized computation tasks
Twenty-two computation tasks were used in U.S. classrooms and 14 in Chinese classrooms. Computation tasks in the
U.S. classroom were related to computations with fractions. All of these tasks were solved and represented symbolically
in the classrooms. Computation tasks in Chinese classrooms were related to calculation of the diameter of a circle given
the radius of the circle, or calculating the radius of a circle given the diameter. Symbolic representations were used
to represent the solutions to these computation tasks in Chinese classroom. However, for two of the 14 computation
tasks, Chinese teachers also used drawings of circles to explain how to find the diameter of a circle given the radius,
or the radius of a circle given the diameter.