Five of the eight students made “substantial” or “reasonable” gains and three made “no
gain”. For each of the eight students, the quality and frequency of responses for Benchmark
Task 2 were higher than for Benchmark Task 1. In Benchmark Task 1, students may have
displayed emerging contextual thinking without applying mathematical ideas or they may
have displayed genuine contextual thinking but only gave one example. For Benchmark
Task 2, all students provided multiple responses incorporating mathematical ideas relevant
to the context of the task. Responses by the student Tania were typical of those of the other
seven students and are shown here in Table 3. It can be seen that Tania gave more
responses and more detailed responses to the second task compared to the first. In addition,
during the second task, she displayed strategic thinking that was not evident in her
responses to the first task.