Date of Award:

12-2026

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Committee Chair(s)

Katherine N. Vela (Committee Chair), Michelle Frierson (Committee Co-Chair)

Committee

Katherine N. Vela

Committee

Michelle Frierson

Committee

Alyson Lavigne

Committee

Sarah Braden

Committee

David F. Feldon

Abstract

Even when students have learned the same concept, they often cannot apply it in different situations. This study explored why high school students (ages 13-16) have such difficulty connecting what they learn in math class to science class, and to everyday life.

Students were given the same slope problems in different settings: two different math classes and a science class. These problems were chosen to have similar levels of difficulty, with the differences between them being their placement in a science-type problem, a mathematical-type problem, and a real-world scenario. Researchers asked students to explain their thinking through writing or in clinical interviews.

The results were eye-opening: when students encountered a problem, the context mattered. If a problem appeared in a math classroom, students would approach it one way, using practices associated with a constant conception and a procedural emphasis. The exact same problem occurred in a science classroom? They’d tackle it completely differently. Most surprisingly, students labeled almost everything as a “math problem” when they were in a math classroom, even when the problem was clearly scientific or real-world. During the clinical interviews, much more was revealed, with students looking for familiarity over perhaps the correct procedures. Students would go to great lengths to justify how they identified a problem, relating it to past experiences.

What matters is the label students put on a problem: “this is math” versus “this is science,” which determined which knowledge they used and how they solved it. The classroom setting offered invisible guardrails, channeling students toward certain approaches and preventing them from using knowledge they already had. The study suggests that what prevents students from connecting their learning across disciplines/ subjects is not a lack of knowledge; it is that different classroom environments train them to see problems in fundamentally different ways.

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