What is the role of “relevance” in motivating pupils to enjoy maths? We often hear arguments that pupil motivation to learn maths would be better if maths were made more relevant. This blog argues that relevance is not the silver bullet it’s made out to be.
People choose to do things for intrinsic and extrinsic reasons. There are plenty of extrinsic reasons for studying maths. Basic numeracy is a requirement for most jobs. An A-level in maths is associated with a 10% earnings premium (for any given job). For a degree in maths that premium rises to 30%. You can’t work at the cutting edge of technology without maths, and many of the world’s biggest problems require maths to solve them. We’re not short of extrinsic reasons to try hard at maths.
But, as anyone who has taught in a school knows, these are not enough. Many pupils don’t feel motivated to study maths, and this caps their achievement. One solution I often hear is that pupils would be more motivated if maths were made more relevant.
I’m not sure this is the magic solution it’s made out to be.
Something being relevant is a poor proxy for it being interesting. There are many relevant things that are very interesting, but also many that are very boring. Ironing is highly relevant to my life – I do it every week – but I imagine I’d find a weekly ironing lesson rather dull. In the past week I’ve been told pupils should do more budgeting and more recipes in school maths, on the basis that they’re relevant and so will spark interest. The problem is that these are rather dry areas of maths that pupils already spend a lot of time on. Every GCSE pupil will have spent hours going through the procedure for scaling up and down recipes, and I imagine few have found that this sparked a new love of maths.
The implication of arguing that we should scale up the amount of relevant maths is, in a curriculum with limited time, that we should scale down the amount of “irrelevant” maths. This too is problematic.
We don’t know what maths will be relevant, because predicting what applications a given piece of maths will have is a fool’s errand. We didn’t see the huge AI-driven demand for network theorists coming. Nobody would’ve expected the maths behind aperiodic tiling to be a possible key to quantum computing. If we crowd out bits of maths with uncertain applications then we’re constraining ourselves to the applications we already know – and stopping progress in its tracks.
But the thing I’m most concerned about is accepting the implication that the way to motivate people in maths is to dial up the extrinsic reasons rather than the intrinsic ones. I think that our motivation problem in maths is that we are already too focused on pushing extrinsic reasons to learn maths rather than intrinsic ones.
As maths teachers we’re too often on the back foot with being asked “when am I ever going to use this?”, as if that were the sole reason for learning. This question rarely gets asked of the history teacher, or in the poetry lesson. Yet it gets asked in maths because we’ve conceded that extrinsic motivation should dominate.
Instead of dialling this up even further, we need to reclaim our confidence that maths can and should be intrinsically motivating. The best way to do this isn’t to prioritise relevant maths, but interesting maths. There is a big overlap between these categories, but they’re not the same. Plenty of maths tasks that are highly relevant aren’t particularly interesting, whilst plenty of extremely interesting maths tasks aren’t obviously relevant. We should be focusing on maths that offers pupils the opportunity to work towards challenging but achievable goals, where choosing to expend some effort leads to the satisfaction of accomplishing something meaningful.
We should be privileging maths that is interesting in our lessons and our curricula, so that we’re inducting children into a tradition of problem-solving that has captured minds and imaginations for millennia. We should be posing problems where pupils lose themselves in the maths, and gain the incomparable satisfaction of solving them. That is the way to inspire young people to do maths, not endlessly multiplying cake recipes by 1.25.