2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Mathematics in high school has emerged as a barrier that prevents many minority students from pursuing advanced STEM courses in high school and college and limits their selection of STEM oriented careers—and within math, a key area of difficulty is spatial visualization. This work-in-progress paper describes a currently ongoing project that aims to improve both cognitive and socio-emotional student outcomes by: (1) increasing participants’ mathematics academic achievement, and (2) increasing participants’ engagement and other positive dispositions toward STEM instruction. Learning mathematics in engaging contexts through Augmented Reality (AR) that enables students to visualize and embody STEM spatial transformations, has the potential to improve students’ achievement and disposition in mathematics. The features of AR will enable participating pre-college students to see relationships between spatial manipulations and proportional reasoning, thereby bridging the spatial-mathematical divide, and because of the inherently visual nature of AR, AR-powered learning environments might be particularly helpful to addressing the language barriers that many Hispanic students confront while learning challenging mathematical concepts. The AR learning environment developed for this project enables representations for multiple different levels of abstraction to be visualized, but has so far only been tested with college students (with promising results) and so this project’s aim is to support evaluating the effectiveness of the AR learning with pre-college, high school students by using mixed methods research culminating in a quasi-experimental design. By providing AR-powered formal learning that addresses the language barriers that many Hispanic high school students encounter during mathematics instruction, this project can help remove barriers to STEM inclusion that have previously distanced minority students from the STEM education pipeline, while broader impacts from this project lie in the potential to improve minority population engagement and success in STEM fields.