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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren

Question Asking and Storytelling as Means to Increase Mathematics Interest in Teacher Education

Alternative title: Spørsmål og fortellinger som metode for å øke interesse i matematikk i lærerutdanningen

Awarded: NOK 11.8 mill.

How can interest in mathematics in primary and higher education be increased? Interest in STEM subjects has long been a problem in Norwegian education. To address this challenge, it is important to develop interventions that increase interest in mathematics and other STEM subjects. Previous research has shown that various interventions, such as personalization, choice of examples, and relevance interventions, have a positive effect on interest in STEM. However, there are also certain interventions that have been used in mathematics education without sufficient evidence. Two of these measures are asking questions and telling stories in mathematics education. These two measures have therefore been investigated in two sub-projects. In the first sub-project, we will use experimental methods to investigate whether asking or reading questions about mathematics can increase students' interest in the subject. The second sub-project looks at the effect of writing or reading stories in mathematics education. This sub-project examines not only the effects but also the underlying processes. We assume that reading and especially asking questions arouse curiosity, as one often discovers a knowledge gap that one wants to fill. At the same time, developing or reading stories about mathematical problems connects the subject to personal interests. We also measure learning to ensure that increased interest does not come at the expense of the learning process. This is particularly important after previous studies showed that attention-grabbing images could increase interest but at the expense of learning. The project also involves teacher education students, which is exciting as teachers not only need to understand mathematics themselves but also be able to communicate it in an accessible way to students. We will see if increased awareness of the communication process can increase both academic and didactic interest. We started the project in May 2019 with a pilot study where we tested a method for analyzing interest by measuring facial muscles. Unfortunately, this study showed that solving math problems did not lead to measurable interest. We then conducted two online studies with over 1000 international students to test whether it is more interesting to create or read a story. Both studies showed that writing a story is more interesting than reading one. In addition, the second study showed that reading a story is more interesting than reading an academic text on the same topic. We have written a manuscript and submitted it to a journal for review. Another study with Norwegian teacher education students examined whether it is more interesting to write or read a word problem in mathematics. We compared it to a control group that received the task without context. The results showed that both writing and reading a word problem are more interesting than just solving the task without context. We are in the process of writing up this study. We also conducted two online studies to investigate the measures teachers use to increase interest. In both studies, we found that teachers use methods that are easy to use and that they also found interesting. This may mean that certain measures that can increase both interest and learning are underused because they are difficult to implement. This is also important for the interventions we are investigating in this project. We are in the process of submitting a research article on this study.

As interest in mathematics is low among students at all educational levels, it is timely to develop interventions aimed at increasing interest in mathematics. This collaborative project (UiO; HiOA, HVL) examines two new interventions to increase interest in mathematics with Norwegian student teachers; one is question asking and the other is storytelling. Both have become much advertised in science education but their empirical basis is sparse. At a theoretical level, question asking is supposed to increase situational interest because it raises awareness of knowledge gaps, thus increasing curiosity and engagement. Storytelling may increase interest because it embeds abstract principles into a meaningful and personally relevant context. For both interventions, we expect that active conditions where students ask questions or write stories are more effective to raise situational interest than passive conditions where the teacher asks questions or embeds a principle in a story. However, there are limits to cognitive capacity that may impair learning and thus counteract the positive effects on interest. We examine the effects of question asking (Subproject 1) and storytelling (Subproject 2) on both interest and learning outcomes. The first study in each subproject compares student-generated versus teacher-generated questions or stories, respectively. The second study of each subproject examines the type of questions (factual, conceptual, and control) or the type of stories (subject-specific language versus everyday language, and control). The final studies test interventions, one on question asking and another on storytelling, to translate experimental research into a higher education context. The project yields new insights into mechanisms that mediate the effects of question asking and storytelling on interest. At a practical level, these interventions will extend the range of possible interventions to increase interest in mathematics in higher education.

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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren