New Understanding of Relevance from Students’ Perspectives
Aamina Adil, Kihoon Luke Lee, and Leslie Dietiker shared a new analysis of the student interview data:
When mathematics educators work towards making mathematics more relevant, they often think about including more real-world applications into mathematics lessons. But what happens when a lesson is devoid of real-world contexts? In what ways can students find it relevant? This study explores how high school students perceived relevance when they were asked to describe their experience during decontextualized mathematics lessons. Students highlighted how they found certain characteristics of the lessons to be useful in their learning and how they perceived relevance through different feelings experienced in the lessons. This, in turn, broadens our perspective of what relevance means to students.
This paper was presented in Nashville, TN at PME-NA 44 in November, 2022. Read more at the link below.