Making Mathematics Relevant: an Examination of Student Interest in Mathematics, Interest in STEM Careers, and Perceived Relevance

Making Relevance Relevant in Mathematics Teacher Education

One of the features of the reform in school mathematics is that school mathematics should be made relevant to the learners. The incorporation of mathematical modelling in school mathematics is one of the ways that is offered to realise the relevance ideal. Ostensibly the inclusion of mathematical modelling will provide school learners opportunities to develop mathematical power i.e. the ability...

Mathematics achievement and interest in mathematics from a differential perspective

In this article, we present results of an empirical study with 500 German students of grades 7 and 8. The study focussed on students’ mathematics achievement and their interest in mathematics as well as on the relation between these two constructs. In particular, the results show that the development of an individual student’s achievement between grade 7 and grade 8 depends on the achievement l...

Rekindling student interest in generalist careers.

Despite changes in the structure of the U.S. health care system, patients continue to need and seek out generalist physicians. However, the proportion of U.S. graduates of medical schools who choose to enter generalist residency training decreased from 50% in 1998 to less than 40% in the 2004 match. Unless we act now to reverse this trend, we may face a shortage of primary care physicians to ca...

Research Overview : Female Interest in Mathematics

Instruments for Assessing Interest in STEM Content and Careers

Two new instruments created to assess perceptions of science, Technology, engineering, and Math (sTeM) disciplines and careers are analyzed and found to have respectable to excellent internal consistency reliability, as well as good content, construct, and criterion-related validity for the areas assessed. Cronbach’s alpha for the individual scales on the sTeM semantics survey and the sTeM Care...