Various occupations require the practical application of mathematics and most employers want workers with good maths skills. Yet many students who take vocational subjects struggle with maths and problem-solving skills. Vocational subjects potentially offer rich opportunities for students to use maths to solve work-place problems. Teachers of vocational subjects sometimes give anecdotal evidence of students who finally begin to understand abstract mathematical concepts when they see them applied to real situations. This American study investigated whether teaching mathematics during vocational lessons could improve students’ performance in maths and found quantifiable evidence to suggest that it could.
In the study, teachers of Career and Technical Education (CTE) subjects paired up with maths specialists to design new lessons that exploited opportunities to explore maths within a real-life context. They taught the lessons to students aged 16-18 over the course of one term. The study compared the performance of these students with others whose CTE teachers continued to teach in the same way as before. It found many modest and some statistically significant improvements in students’ scores on standardised mathematics tests. Moreover, the time students spent working on improving their maths during the vocational lessons did not detract from their knowledge and skills in the vocational subject itself.
