Adam Čech
Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích, Pedagogická fakulta, České Budějovice
This presentation introduces research focusing on lower-secondary school students and their approach to solving tasks with cross-curricular overlap. In the Czech Republic, there is no tradition of cross-curricular teaching or learning, and the school subject science is divided into physics, chemistry, and biology. The study involved 40 ninth-grade students aged 14–15, who have no prior experience with cross-curricular tasks and are taught by different teachers for math and chemistry. We developed a set of six tasks with progressively increasing interconnectedness of mathematical and chemistry concepts as part of the data collection tool. The tasks are related to the mathematical concept of ratio and the chemistry topics of the law of conservation of mass and molar mass. Our research question is: “Are the students able to identify the mathematical topics embedded in the tasks, and are they aware of the possibility to apply mathematical procedures when solving them?”