This research was undertaken in a Year 8 mathematics classroom in a large metropolitan
city in Australia. The particular lesson and task studied were selected from a data set of
fourteen consecutive lessons from a classroom that was part of the broader international
Learners’ Perspective Study of teachers seen to “display good teaching practice”. The
methodology for the broader study and a more detailed account of the lesson in which this
task was situated has been provided in a previous paper (Williams, 2001) The classroom
research undertaken used three video cameras to simultaneously capture: the whole class,
the teacher, and two focus students. The two focus students took part in individual videostimulated
reconstructive interviews. Evidence was drawn from the video data, classroom
field notes, and student and teacher interview data. The research questions discussed here
are “Is this tool sufficient to account for the actual student responses to the task as
implemented?” And “Does the contrast of potential and actual student responses inform
my study of factors that promote or inhibit creative student thinking?”