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

Clinton, Virginia; Walkington, Candace

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 condition]). Students' problem-solving performance and attitudes were not affected by illustration condition, but learning was better in the control compared with 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 nonpersonalized 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.

MATHEMATICS education (Secondary); CURRICULUM planning; STUDENT engagement; STUDENT interests; VISUAL aids

Journal of Educational Research, 2019, Vol 112, Issue 4, p495

0022-0671

Academic Journal

10.1080/00220671.2019.1568958