Recommendations Overview
The following messaging recommendations are informed by insights and findings from The Math Narrative Project. To see more detailed messaging recommendations for specific audiences, visit Students, Teachers, or Parents*.
*Throughout this website, the research team uses ‘parent’ to refer to both parents and guardians.
ELEVATE STUDENT AGENCY: Messaging should elevate student agency and center students’ emotions and experiences, which are critical to their math learning.
ACKNOWLEDGE REAL-WORLD CONTEXT: Empathize with students, teachers, and parents by acknowledging and naming the real-world challenges they face.
ACKNOWLEDGE EMOTIONS IN MATH LEARNING: Normalize the emotional nature of learning math, and provide examples of how negative emotions can be reinterpreted.
MAKE MATH RELEVANT: Deliver credible and motivational messaging on the relevance, value, and utility of higher-level math for students’ lives, desired careers, and futures.
AFFIRM THE VALUE OF MISTAKES: Normalize making mistakes as an important and valuable part of learning, including learning math.
ENCOURAGE HELP-SEEKING: Build student confidence to seek the help they need to learn math and equip parents and teachers with messaging that supports and encourages students to seek out help.
REFRAME STRUGGLE AND CAPABILITY: Reframe struggle from a sign of lacking capability to a sign of needing support.
PRIORITIZE BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS: Show teachers the impact of their relationships with students on math learning, and support teachers to prioritize building relationships in their classrooms.
REASSESS ASSUMPTIONS: Encourage teachers to reexamine their assumptions about what certain student behaviors mean and the impact of students’ negative emotions on their math learning experience.
See more detailed messaging recommendations for specific audiences: