Examples in the Teaching of Mathematics: Teachers' Perceptions

As part of a study examining how teachers in Singapore select and use examples for teaching mathematics, 121 teachers from 24 secondary schools responded to three open ended questions about the use of examples in teaching. The results show that students’ abilities and the difficulty level of the examples were among the topmost considerations teachers have when introducing mathematical ideas or when selecting homework tasks. This paper also reports on teachers’ perceptions of a good example.