We sought inputs from a group of experienced teachers in Malaysian and Australian
classrooms as to the appropriateness of the tasks. Teachers were asked to comment on the
language, difficulty and the richness of the context thatwould support elaboration by students
of both countries. We also pilot tested the tasks with a group of children from Malaysia and
Australia. The final instrument, Numeracy Word Vignette (NWV), included three problem
contexts (Table 1). All the three contexts required students to represent the problem and talk
around the core ideas underlying the contexts. PC1 was deemed to be a Near-Transfer Task,
as it involved one or two procedural moves with limited representations. The solution of PCs
2 and 3, in contrast, required students to generate more explanations and allowed for the
construction of a variety of models and chains of reasoning. These two contexts represented
Far-Transfer Tasks.