Do Real-World Connections Make Tasks Catch Secondary School Students’ Interest? What Preservice Teachers Expect and What Students Really Experience

Teachers should correctly assess which tasks are interesting for their students. A study by Rellensmann and Schukajlow (2017) found that intra-mathematical tasks were more interesting to students than tasks with real-world connections, yet preservice teachers deemed tasks with real-world context to be more interesting to students. We assumed that this result would not hold for contexts that closely connect to students’ lives. We surveyed 34 eighth graders and 53 preservice teachers about how interesting students find tasks in current contexts (climate change and COVID -19) and about how preservice teachers estimate students’ interest. The students’ interest in tasks with superficial wrapper relationships to the context was greater than in tasks without real-world context. Surprisingly, however, tasks with deeper tapestry relationships to the context were not found more interesting. We further confirmed that preservice teachers overestimated students’ interest in tapestry tasks and underestimated how interesting wrapper tasks and intra-mathematical tasks can be. The impact sheet to this article can be accessed at 10.6084/m9.figshare.27151230