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The Effect of Meaningful Tasks on Secondary One Students’ Mathematics Examination Performance and Engagement

Research has indicated that students who had opportunities to be engaged in meaningful tasks during mathematics lessons achieved higher academic outcomes and had positive attitudes toward mathematics. This study focused on Mathematics lessons with meaningful tasks that created opportunities for cooperative learning involving real and relevant problem solving. In this study, the school developed a framework EASY (Experiencing, Applying and Synergy) to guide the design of meaningful tasks. One project class and one comparison class of Secondary One (Grade 7) Express course students participated in this study, with the project class working on the meaningful tasks. Using a quasi-experimental design, the two groups were compared in the following: engagement level, Mathematics examination scores and perceptions of dimensions such as seeing interconnections between subject matter and contexts (E), assessment to improve learning (A) and relevance of learning content (L). Using standardised mean difference, the results revealed that there was a strong effect in Mathematics examination scores in favour of the project group. In addition, there was also a strong effect observed in the different types of engagement (affective, behavioural and cognitive) with the project group displaying higher scores. With regard to the scales A, E and L, strong effect in favour of the project group was observed. This paper discusses how meaningful tasks have engaged the students. In addition, the teachers’, use of information gathered from the meaningful tasks to improve learning will be discussed.

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