Students authoring personalized “algebra stories”: Problem-posing in the context of out-of-school interests

•We bring together research on problem-posing and personalization to student interests.•A personalized problem-posing intervention enhances interest in mathematics.•Students encounter several difficulties with personalized problem-posing.•School norms, math knowledge, and knowledge of interest areas mediate effects.

Algebra is an important subject for students’ educational and economic futures; however student interest in mathematics declines over adolescence. Bringing together research on personalizing learning to students’ interests and research on student problem-posing offers a potentially important approach to enhancing algebraic understanding. We engaged 24 students in one-on-one interview sessions where they solved and posed algebra story problems based on their out-of-school interests in topics like sports, video games, and social networking. We found that participating in the session enhanced interest in mathematics. However students encountered some difficulties with algebraic problem-posing, including using precise language, accounting for the intercept term, and conceptualizing a relationship between unknown quantities. Using six cases of more successful and less successful students, we uncovered three themes: students’ “funds of knowledge” about their interest areas acted as an important scaffold, as did prior knowledge of algebra and a grasp of school norms related to story problems. This study reveals how students’ out-of-school interests can support the learning of algebra, while also providing a critical examination of the assumptions underlying problem-posing.