How does connecting what students are learning in math to the real world, their interests, hobbies, and lived experiences impact their participation in the classroom and attitude towards math?

By secondary schooling, students' attitudes towards math appear set and fixed, impacting their participation in the classroom. The most common questions math teachers get are: "Why do we need to know/learn this?" and "What/when/where are we going to use this for?" If students relate and connect to the subject not just in their future jobs/careers but how it's used in their everyday lives, then they will care for it more. This will increase and improve their participation in the classroom and their attitudes towards math. 

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Key Features:

  • All About Me surveys given at the beginning of the school year to get to know students' names, preferred names/nicknames, birthdays, pronouns, favorite things and places, places they want to travel to/visit someday, future jobs/careers, etc.
  • Baseline participation and attitude survey
  • Pre-survey current participation and attitude survey
  • Real-world math application problems taken from the curriculum, but personalized to students as individuals. These are used throughout the unit as Do Nows (warm-ups), direct instruction examples, and independent practice problems.
  • At the end of the unit, students conduct their own research on how the math they learned this unit is used in any other subjects, interests, hobbies, everyday objects or experiences, future jobs/careers, etc. and journal about their findings.
  • Post-cycle data: how has their participation and attitude changed? Which (the real-world math application problems or the research math journals) had a bigger impact?