Personalizing Mathematics to Maximize Relevance and Skill for Tomorrow's STEM Workforce

该项目将推进学生和教师创新技术体验（ITEST）计划的努力，以更好地理解和促进提高学生在科学，技术，工程，或数学（STEM）通过开发和测试干预系统，让学生参与有意义的STEM问题提出和解决，并通过提供一个这是一个合作项目，涉及三所不同的院校，利用个性化策略来加强学生在STEM途径中的代数兴趣和技能。该项目将建立一个环境，通过提出和解决故事问题，支持代数学生在STEM职业兴趣背景下学习关键内容。所提出的问题是基于代数内容，与STEM职业道路相关，并嵌入在技术界面中。创新，使用个性化的问题提出任务，以吸引学生认识，制定和解决问题，由数学是如何在STEM职业生涯的框架，是一个引人注目的战略，以吸引学生和促进STEM学习。 该项目将研究高中代数的教学干预，将课程内容与STEM职业联系起来，以提高学生对这些领域的兴趣。此外，在生涯路径建构中，本研究将探讨个人化问题提出与问题解决对学生代数技能发展的影响。具体来说，该项目将研究如何不同的脚手架方法，以干职业问题提出（例如，专家视频与示例）影响学生提出的问题以及他们获得的兴趣和知识。这项研究的结果有可能为个性化和学生生成解决问题的任务提供证据，以提高学生在代数和STEM领域的兴趣。该研究旨在确认成功的个性化学习所需的三个特征的分类：内容应该个性化，以便与学生的兴趣保持一致，问题必须足够细粒度，以便更精确地与学生的兴趣保持一致，这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase student motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by developing and testing an intervention system to engage students in meaningful STEM problem posing and solving and by providing an on-line tool to assist teachers in guiding the process.This is a collaborative project involving three different institutions to use personalization strategies to strengthen students' algebraic interest and skills in STEM pathways. The project will build an environment to support algebra students' learning key content in the context of their STEM career interests by posing and solving story problems. The problems posed are based on algebra content, related to STEM career paths, and embedded in a technological interface. The innovation, of using personalized problem-posing tasks to entice students to recognize, formulate, and solve problems, framed by how mathematics is used in STEM careers, is a compelling strategy to engage students and promote STEM learning. The project will examine an instructional intervention for high school algebra that connects course content to the STEM careers to increase students' interest in those fields. In addition, within the career pathways construct, the study will investigate the effect of personalized problem posing as well as problem solving on students' algebra skill development. Specifically, the project will examine how different scaffolding approaches to STEM career problem-posing (e.g., expert video vs. examples) affect the problems posed by students and the interest and knowledge that they gain. The findings of the study have the potential will build evidence for both personalization and student generation of problem-solving tasks on improving student learning in algebra and interest in STEM fields. The study seeks to confirm a taxonomy of three features necessary for successful personalized learning: content should be personalized so that it aligns to student interests, problems must be sufficiently granular to more precisely align to student interests, and students must perceive ownership in the process.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.