The Adult Math Project

The Adult Math Project was the empirical study that gave Lave's theoretical framework its most devastating evidence. Conducted in the early 1980s among thirty-five adult shoppers in Orange County, California, the study observed the same individuals performing arithmetic in two settings: in the supermarket, where they calculated prices and compared unit costs as part of their normal shopping routine; and in a formal testing environment, where they solved mathematically identical problems stripped of their practical context. The results were not subtle. The gap between in-context performance (approaching 98%) and out-of-context performance (around 59%) held across ages, educational backgrounds, and mathematical confidence levels. People who considered themselves "bad at math" and who performed poorly on paper were virtuosos in the aisles.