Abstract
This article is an exploration of the relationship between student engagement and real-life application, specifically in higher-level mathematics classes at the secondary education level. Researchers overwhelmingly agree that math must be meaningful to students in order to engage them cognitively, and that the best way to make math meaningful for students is to demonstrate its applicability via students’ lived experiences. This article explores two issues that teachers of higher-level mathematics (post-algebra 1/geometry) should consider with regard to making connections between mathematics and the real world. First, what should teachers do when application problems for a particular math skill don’t truly exist or are illegitimate (for instance: a question that would never be asked outside of a math classroom)? Second, how can teachers effectively and honestly demonstrate applications of higher-level math in ways that will be meaningful to students? Research shows that attempting to validate the learning of higher-level math through the use of forced application problems often alienates teachers from students (and vice versa), and actually undermines an educator’s goal of engaging students. Instead, math teachers should embrace multi-day, unstructured, application-based projects that involve an element of in-class social interaction.
