Interest-enhancing approaches to mathematics curriculum design: Illustrations and personalization

Abstract

Two common interest-enhancement approaches in mathematics curriculum design are illustrations and personalization of problems to students' interests. The objective of these experiments is to test a variety of illustrations and personalization approaches. In the illustrations experiment, students (N = 265) were randomly assigned to lessons with story problems containing decorative illustrations, contextual illustrations, diagrammatic illustrations, misleading illustrations, or no illustrations (only text; control). Students' problem-solving performance and attitudes were not affected by illustration condition, but learning was better in the control compared to contextual illustrations. In the personalization experiment, students (N = 223) were randomly assigned to story problems that were either personalized based on: a survey of their interests, their choice of interest topics, a randomly-assigned interest topic, or the original non-personalized story problem (control). The findings indicated there were benefits for choice personalization both for performance in the problem set as well as on a later learning assessment.

Testing the seductive details effect: Does the format or the amount of seductive details matter?

“…Although these findings are inconsistent with the large body of seductive details studies pointing to negative effects on learning, in recent years, there is an increasing number of studies that failed to obtain the negative effect (e.g., Cliton & Walkington, 2019;Park & Lim, 2007) or even obtained a beneficial effect (e.g., Ketzer-Nöltge, Schweppe, & Rummer, 2019;Lehman, Hamm, & Seufert, 2019). This suggests that the seductive details effect is not as robust as previously assumed.…”

The Hidden Talents Framework

“…One approach has been to make connections between what students do in school and their out-ofschool lives by customizing academic texts to learners' interests and prior knowledge. In randomized experiments, this form of personalization has meaningfully increased engagement and performance in mathematics among middle and high school students (Bernacki & Walkington, 2018;Clinton & Walkington, 2019;Høgheim & Reber, 2015;Walkington, 2013), particularly when the connections between academic texts and learners' interests/knowledge are relatively deep. Although this research has not specifically examined stress-adapted students, personalization appears to be most effective among students who are struggling with or have low initial interest in math (Høgheim & Reber, 2015;Walkington, 2013).…”

Transcend socioeconomic status constraints to mathematics and science achievement by collaborative problem-solving: The female people-smartness hypothesis

“…We can further infer that with complex problems involving both things and people, females' people-smartness if fully functioning would likely facilitate their solving traditionally things-focused problems. The inference is based on the rationale that incorporating personal interests into teaching would increase student interest and achievement (Høgheim and Reber, 2015;Bernacki and Walkington, 2018;Clinton and Walkington, 2019). If females emphasize and value people (as the FPS hypothesis implies females' interest in people), incorporating people-related pedagogies (e.g., CPS, collaborative/cooperative learning, and microteaching) into mathematics and science curricula might invite females to STEM fields.…”