Through the Adapted Measure of Math Engagement (AM-ME) project, we aim to enhance math learning environments and increase Black and Latino middle and high school students’ engagement in math.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, this three-year project partners with five schools to investigate the experiences of Black and Latino students’ engagement in math and develop an evidence-based measure for math teachers to assess that level of engagement. Ultimately, the project aims to create a practical tool that math teachers can use across the country.
This project is a partnership between Child Trends, Search Institute, McREL International, and Bloomington Public Schools.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is a continuously growing and relatively high-paying field in the United States, which also fails to recruit and retain Black and Latino talents.
Math is a key subject for entering STEM fields, and research suggests that various educational factors influence student engagement in math. However, existing measures of Black and Latino student engagement in math often fail to capture the different ways in which math can be engaging for these students. Additionally, current measures of student engagement are inconsistent in what they assess—making it difficult to track engagement over time—and have not been widely validated across different student groups.
This project addresses these gaps in Black and Latino students’ engagement with math by using an evidence-based approach that considers their experiences, values, and perspectives, helping to improve math learning practices.
We organized a cross-disciplinary group of five researchers, five teachers, and five students—jointly known as the AM-ME Research Group—to co-design and implement this project.
Using an iterative, mixed-methods approach, the AM-ME Research Group:
By intertwining qualitative and quantitative methods, this project will explore Black and Latino students’ math engagement and develop an evidence-based measure that reflects how students think, feel, and perform in their math courses.
This model of research is rooted in the belief that those served by research should participate in the design of research questions, methods, analyses, interpretations, and action planning. This approach encourages researchers, teachers, and students to investigate ways to better serve the needs of those not benefiting from current practices.
At the end of the project, we will produce a toolkit that explains how we created the AMME so that school districts can create their own measures of math engagement that capture the experiences of the communities they serve.
We regularly share learnings with local and national audiences through blogs, infographics, presentations, and journal articles.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, grant #2200437. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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