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Math, middle schoolers and real-world relevance (infographic)

Meredith Swallow 7 Comments ,

I consider myself an infographic enthusiast, and as a former middle school math teacher when the infographic below was passed on to me I was of course interested:

 

An infographic showing the types of connections middle school students make about math and the real world

 

It was encouraging to see 7 out of 10 students liked math, but out of 1000 surveyed students, that means there are about 300 that don’t; and that isn’t so encouraging.  Scrolling down to Top Favorite Subjects, I was again hopeful when seeing math ranked third.

While that alone was pleasing to a former math teacher, I was also excited to see that P.E. and art ranked one and two respectively.  I’m a firm believer that exercise boosts learning, and I don’t think I need to make a case for the connections between art, creativity, and math. I wasn’t surprised to see that students enjoy learning new subjects through hands-on activities, but what the Infographic leaves out is that only 4% of surveyed students enjoy learning new subjects through video lessons.  During this revolution of flipped instruction, that 4% seems a little concerning. 

So, what is my big takeaway from this Infographic?  Relevance. 

With only 58% of students reporting that math is important for their future, we don’t seem to be doing a good job of promoting authentic relevance to students’ lives.  I don’t put much weight into the statistic that 38% of students think math is important for fashion design.  What if I don’t care about fashion design?  I’m certainly not going to care then about the necessary skills behind fashion design. 

So how is math relevant to your students?  And what can you do to support that connection?

Meredith Swallow

Meredith Swallow is in her fourth year as a doctoral student at UVM, and is working with the Tarrant Institute as a Research Associate and Professional Development Coordinator. As a former middle- and high-school math teacher, Meredith facilitated environments of engaged, active learning, by supporting the connection of knowledge through interaction, understanding, and meaning. Her research focuses on the intersection of educational technology, content knowledge, and pedagogy, and how that supports twenty-first century educational goals and outcomes. She strives to model effective technology integration across multiple disciplines by recognizing diverse learning needs and specific school and teacher contexts. When not studying or engaging in research, Meredith enjoys her time in the outdoors hiking with her trusted sidekick Jack the Dog.

7 thoughts on “Math, middle schoolers and real-world relevance (infographic)”

  • pyoung@etsd.org'
    pyoung
    May 2, 2014 at 2:46 pm
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    Using real world projects for middle school students is vital. This year in my 7th and 8th grade math classes we connected our project work with our math class several times. A one recent examples was when we hatched chicks. In math, we collected data and calculated the percent increase in weight over a weeks time for all 11 chicks. We also graphed the data of course. Another example was while learning about rates and ratios we made a movie on the ipad of our sap running in the sugar bush to calculate the rate of sap flow. We collected 10 ml in a minute with 33 drips and this gave us the start to calculate how much sap we could collect in a day from all 50 trees using the idea that this is an average tree.

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  • veronicamay77@gmail.com'
    Veronica
    November 21, 2014 at 6:08 am
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    Why the Art is so popular? The students don’t want to think, learn and solve some analytical tasks so the Art is easier for them.

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