What do students want to learn about?
Skew The Script started with a math teacher asking his students what they wanted to learn about. The students’ responses helped shape a new and genuinely relevant math curriculum that covered their topics of interest, which ranged from sports and online dating to the environment and gerrymandering.
Now, every year, we invite students using our materials across the country to do the same, voting on new lesson topics in our Student Annual Survey. In November, over 1,200 high school students took the survey. They not only made their voices heard by voting on provided topics, but they also submitted great new topics and questions for future consideration.
From the topics we provided, students showed the most interest in questions about college and about AI. Not so much about Taylor Swift though! Students ranked their interest level from 1 (not interesting) to 5 (very interesting). On these pie charts, the darker colors show higher interest levels, with the blue arc highlighting the highest interest scores of 4 or 5.
Does your college major matter to your eventual income?
Does going to a college with higher tuition eventually pay off?
How does AI impact student learning?
Which jobs will AI affect the most?
How much does a Taylor Swift concert impact the local economy?
What happens next:
We take topics that students are interested in and look for the math to answer their questions. Then we develop units or lessons about them and include them in courses, where they can make learning genuinely relevant! In fact, we’re already working on an AP Stats lesson that focuses on this next one –
Does participating in social media increase anxiety levels for high school students?
Students also had the opportunity to share their own questions about the world, and together they created an amazing list of topics for us to consider! Here’s a sample of several student-submitted questions:
How much does AI affect the environment?
How do high school cell phone policies affect student wellbeing and safety?
Which is a better predictor of college readiness, SAT or ACT?
Among all the questions submitted, we found that…
19% were about AI, automation, and the future of work
15% were about K12 teaching and learning
12% were about civics, public policy, and social topics
12% were about college admissions, return on investment for a college degree, and student finance
10% were about the economy, work, and cost of living
10% were about climate, environment, energy, & sustainability
9% were about social media, attention, & mental health
5% were about physical health and wellbeing
3.5% were about science, space, oceans, and “big questions”
2.5% were about sports, pop culture, & entertainment
2% were about other topics
We’ll list the most common student-submitted questions in next year’s Student Annual Survey, where next year’s cohort will get the chance to vote for the questions that seem most interesting to them. As usual, the questions with the highest tallies will be pulled into our curriculum writing process and become the subject of new lessons.
Want to make sure your students’ voices are heard? Sign up for the Skew The Script mailing list to receive the next Student Annual Survey to share with your students. It can be completed anonymously, with no individual student information collected.
Teachers enrolled in the mailing list will also receive the Teacher Annual Survey early in the coming year. Watch for it to make your voice heard, too.
Let’s skew it!
