Researchers have used it to build a satellite, find out which dinosaur is fastest and figure out the territorial patterns of wolves.
There are plenty of interesting things you can do with math but an Edmonton educator say kids aren’t sold on its real world value or their abilities in the subject.
“Students don’t feel confident in math but they desperately want to be good at it,” Assistant Principal Christine Dibben said. “That tells us something as math teachers. How do we create opportunities for students to really be good at math and to feel successful at math?”
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Dibben and research consultant Lisa Farlow are surveying about 2,000 junior and senior high school students in northeast Edmonton to see if there’s a connection between how kids feel about math and their performance in the subject. They want to know about confidence, interest and whether kids see value in the work.
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“When you talk to a student who hasn’t done well in math in the past and you say, ‘What’s up?’ they’ll often say, ‘Oh, I didn’t see any point’ or ‘I didn’t think I was very good at it,'” Farlow said.
“If we can change those attitudes it can lead to increased performance as well as increased enjoyment and increased confidence.”
In addition to measuring attitudes, Farlow wants to see if girls or indigenous students feel differently about the subject than other kids.
“It would be disappointing to think people – girls or boys or anybody – who could be really skilled or really enjoy math has been turned away from it for these socially constructed stereotypes of who can do what,” Farlow said. “I hope this survey helps teachers fight those perceptions.”
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Dibben also wants to know where kids get their attitudes from. As a math teacher for 12 years, she says some parents would regularly tell her they didn’t mind if their child didn’t succeed in math because it wasn’t an easy subject for them in school.
“We would never say that about reading and writing. We would never say it’s okay not to know how to read … We need students and people within society who understand numeracy and are able to apply the math they’ve learned and understand the value of it.”
Dibben says the goal is to make learning math exciting and inclusive in a way that encourages students to explore engineering, technology and other careers involving numbers.
Farlow expects to collect survey results by mid-October and use them with students’ final grades this summer to get a sense of how feelings about math may affect performance.
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