The earlier research (Hoyles et al (1), Noss et al (2)) uncovered some quite sophisticated mathematical activities in practices where very little mathematics was explicitly recognised (or admitted to) by the practitioners. What emerged was a pattern of mathematics-in-use in which the mathematics of school was transformed into something rather different; numerical calculations, for example, were not just about quantities, but part of a social practice involving things; numerical relations were seen to be a part of the properties of objects rather than representations of the quantities involved. For example, nurses were observed to have a sophisticated understanding of ratio and proportion, but this understanding was situated in the tools and techniques of drug administration; that is, the nurses think about ratio not in terms of ―abstract‖ mathematical objects, but in terms of the objects of their everyday practice.
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