ABSTRACT
In investigating the ways in which teachers assess pupils’ texts, 11 experienced teachers were asked to read and assess three piece of student’s coursework on tasks set by LEAG (LEAG, 1991). Six of the teachers read work on the ‘Inner Triangle’ task (investigating the relationship between the dimensions and the area of trapezia drawn on isometric paper) while the rest read work on the ‘Topples’ task (investigating the point at which piles of Cuisenaire rods starting with a small rod and adding successively larger rods will topple over). All of the children’s texts on both tasks contained diagrams of one sort or another. It is the ways in which teachers read these diagrams and the values that they placed on them that I intend to address in this paper.
