Chapter 7: The ‘What’ and the ‘How’ of Our Research: Working With Participants' Expectations

Working with participants and motivating them to stay engaged in our research inevitably involved understanding and managing their expectations about the focus of our projects. This chapter picks up from a theme raised in Chapter 6 – that of participants' understanding of the focus of our research. We will now explore the nature of the expectations that our participants held about the content and focus of our projects. Specifically, we will consider our participants' expectations about what mathematics is, about how we learn to think in mathematical ways and about the context or location (on school premises) of our project activity. We will consider how those expectations shaped the way we interacted with our participants and thus how expectations became key factors in both our methods and our findings.