The Context for Contextualizing - Design Implications for Adaptive Teacher Support Systems for More Relevant Instruction

Contextualization in education connects learning material to students' experiences and background knowledge to make it relevant and meaningful. It involves placing content in a real-world context to show students the practical applications and relevance of the concepts they are learning. Contextualizing is an important pedagogical strategy. In order to support teachers in this effort, it is necessary to understand what contexts to provide for teachers to make relevant instruction in certain situations. In this paper, we aim to explore: In what context do teachers need students' everyday life experiences to make the class more relevant to students? We conducted focus groups with teachers who shared their contextualizing experiences. The context for contextualizing refers to the information used to characterize the situation in the classroom and the experiences of the students. The results of this research include the three categories of context information, time, activity, and location, that are relevant to the lesson and the students' prior experiences related to these factors. Design implications are discussed in this paper to illustrate how adaptive teacher support systems can provide relevant and meaningful information to the teachers by considering context information and students' prior experiences.