Low completion rates of math courses pose a major challenge for community college students’ educational progress and outcomes. Contextualized instruction has been identified as a promising approach to removing some of the longstanding barriers within math teaching and learning. Still, the empirical base on this topic remains small, with particularly little evidence on how exposure to math contextualization relates to students’ longer-term educational outcomes, which bear important implications for institutions’ performance metrics and policymaking. We contribute new research on this front by examining how exposure to math contextualization relates to a range of interim and longer-term educational outcomes at a large community college in a Midwestern state. We applied the genetic matching approach to construct a study sample that was balanced in background characteristics between the student group receiving contextualized math instruction and their counterparts enrolled in traditional math courses. We adopted a set of regression analyses based on the matched sample, and found a significant positive relationship between exposure to math contextualization and students’ outcome measures, including course performance, term GPA, continuous postsecondary enrollment, credential completion, and upward transfer.

数学课程的低完成率对社区大学生的教育进步和成果构成了重大挑战。情境化教学已被确定为消除数学教学中一些长期存在的障碍的有前途的方法。尽管如此，关于这个主题的实证基础仍然很小，特别是很少有证据表明数学情境化与学生的长期教育成果之间的关系，这对机构的绩效指标和政策制定具有重要意义。我们通过研究在中西部州的一所大型社区学院中接触数学情境与一系列中期和长期教育成果之间的关系，为这方面的新研究做出了贡献。我们应用基因匹配方法构建了一个研究样本，该样本在接受情境化数学教学的学生群体与参加传统数学课程的学生群体之间的背景特征上是平衡的。我们基于匹配的样本采用了一组回归分析，发现数学情境化的暴露与学生的结果衡量指标之间存在显着的正相关关系，包括课程表现、学期 GPA、连续高等教育入学、证书完成和向上转移。