January 2025

Do STEM professionals really use linear, exponential, and logarithmic functions? Is math really “everywhere”? 

The 2024–2025 cohort of CPM’s Teacher Research Corps has a team of teachers studying an endemic question for mathematics educators: how to make mathematics feel more relevant to students’ lives. How many times have you heard, “When am I ever going to use this?” Really, I think many of us wonder about the utility of mathematics outside of preparing for future courses. It turns out that for STEM professionals, algebraic relationships are a rare luxury, because real-world data is much more messy and complex than the clean word problems students encounter in textbooks. 

Common Answers to “Why Algebra?” Fall Short 

If this is true, then what is the value of courses like algebra? Is algebra simply a gatekeeping course? Will students ever actually use it outside of school? According to Dr. Candice Walkington, common answers to why we need algebra fall short of being compelling. Such answers include: 

• workforce readiness (There is not a lot of evidence to support this.);
• preparation for democratic citizenship (Why algebra instead of statistics or data science?);
• problem-solving skills (This is a big assumption about transfer, and about algebra being the optimal context for problem-solving over other contexts.); or
• perhaps an unspoken desire to maintain social inequalities by sticking to tradition (i.e., gatekeeping). 

How Experts in STEM Use Math in their Careers

A recent study funded by the National Science Foundation studied the usefulness of algebra in STEM careers to see how algebra might be useful to students. They interviewed STEM professionals with the goal of understanding when they used algebra in their work. Based on their interviews with STEM professionals, they created free modules (in the ASSISTments platform) where students can choose a STEM career of their choice and explore how mathematics is used in that career. The tool also supports students in exploring how mathematics is used in popular culture areas like sports, video games, and social networking. (Their next grant is exploring how 7th-grade math is used in popular culture!) They have created activities around these investigations to support students in building identities as STEM knowers and doers, and potentially future STEM professionals. You can learn more about how to access their content at the study’s site, Stories of Algebra. 

Overall, they found that functions—a relationship between two quantities that can vary—was the most compelling idea in algebra related to STEM careers. They created video resources featuring STEM professionals that describe how topics including logarithmic functions, power functions, exponential functions, and linear functions with negative y-intercepts are used in STEM careers. They also have a video series about how algebra is used in particular careers, including psychology/social science, crime scene investigation, biomedical research, space/weather science, animal/plant science, food/drink science, information technology, health care, social networking, business/finance, sports, video games, and even shopping. I have not watched them all yet, but I am so excited to learn more. I wish I had this resource when I was teaching! You can access the videos via their YouTube channel, How Experts Use Math. 

Access More Research Resources with NCTM Webinars like JRMEtalks

I learned about these resources by attending a “JRMEtalk,” a free webinar available to anyone. JRME is the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, a leading mathematics education research journal published by NCTM. JRMEtalks feature the authors of articles from manuscripts that will be published in upcoming issues. The authors give a sneak peek into their studies and share additional thoughts not published in the article. For the busy educator, I would say that JRMEtalks are much more accessible than JRME research reports. Archived webinars from the past two seasons and this season so far are available at https://bit.ly/JRMETalksCanvas. You just have to register for the (ungraded, unmonitored) “course,” and then you can watch the video recordings at your leisure. The authors featured in this JRME talk were Candice Walkington, Matthew Bernacki, Elizabeth Leyva, and Brooke Istas. 

If you want to learn more about how to support students in experiencing relevance and connection in mathematics class, be sure to check out the sessions from CPM’s Teacher Researchers at CPM’s annual Teacher Conference conference, and be sure to check out end-of-year TRC reports!