Sharing the Cost of a Taxi Ride

We aimed to explore the extent to which a challenging yet accessible real world financial context where two people stand to gain from sharing a taxi ride might stimulate students’ mathematical exploration and discovery related to multiplicative thinking and proportional reasoning. Data were collected from 37 Year 5 and 6 students (10-12 years of age) in a Catholic primary school in suburban Melbourne. The findings reveal that the majority of students had some intuitive understanding of how to solve a financial problem that involved rates, and at least half of them used either proportional reasoning or multiplicative thinking. We argue that, given the right problem context, upper primary school students can be encouraged to engage in proportional reasoning earlier than the Australian Curriculum requires.