In 1982, research was conducted in Brazil to explore the computational strategies that children and adults use to work with numbers in their jobs and in school. This research project, called the Brazilian Maths on the Street Project, was conducted in Recife, one of the six largest cities in the country. At that time, the population was approximately 1.5 million people, many of them migrant workers who came from the rural areas of the country looking for work. To survive in the city, usually their first source of income was from begging on the streets. As time went on, many ended up in the informal sector of the economy. This sector is an unofficial part of the economy that is characterized by relatively unskilled jobs that requires little education and that produces intermittent income. In Recife, approximately 30% of the workforce are working in the informal sector as their primary means of income and 18% as a secondary income source.

These workers' income depends on their families' capacity for work. To survive under these conditions, many poor children as young as eight years old are forced to work as street traders in the markets helping in their parents' stores. It is also not uncommon to find older children in their teens working for themselves selling snack foods on the streets. These children, most without formal education, are able to solve mathematical problems to conduct their business. They manage their inventory, measure products, calculate total costs for customers, and make change using a constantly changing currency system. They make these calculations without using paper and pencil. They have devised their own ways of solving computational problems in their heads.

Yet these same children as well as adults who are trying to improve their educational status are not successful in the state schools. They are frequently required to repeat grade levels because they cannot demonstrate that they have mastered the required mathematical content. It is not unusual for a 14-year-old poor child to be studying at the level of a 10-year-old child.

Further, testing of these poor children indicate that they are not developmentally delayed or intellectually limited. Indeed, many of these children are using mathematics effectively in their work as street traders. How is it that children who are adept at mentally computing with numbers have difficulty completing equivalent mathematical computations in school?

Researchers interviewed children working as street traders to identify the ways they mentally calculate the amounts of money that customers owe to them and the change they must give back to the customers. Children were also asked to complete equivalent computations with paper and pencil as they would in a school setting. All of the computations involved addition and subtraction.

The mathematical tasks they gave to the children and adults were embedded in conversations about the daily activities that were typical of their jobs so that they might describe the ways they actually calculate with numbers when they are working.

Also interviewed were unschooled adult carpenters, fishermen, and clammers who developed mental mathematical skills to meet the needs of their work. These people independently developed their own proportional reasoning, multiplication, and division strategies.

Additionally, the researchers went into schools and observed teachers teaching mathematics to their students. They saw that students learned and attempted to use computational procedures but made errors that indicated that they did not understand the meaning of what they were doing.

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