Implementation intention as a cognitive strategy in STEM education : assessing pre-algebraic performance in 8th grade math instruction.

Conceptualization of STEM has been a challenge due to varying perspectives within schools, school districts, and instructors. Implementation intention refers to a memory encoding strategy in which individuals explicitly specify retrieval cues to help them remember to perform goal directed actions. This study’s objective was to examine if the integration of implementation intention encoding would differ from STEM students to students in a traditional classroom. Moreover, comparing math performance between students trained and not trained in an implementation intention strategy. Results from a 2 X 2 ANOVA test and reported means indicate that participants in the treatment groups at both schools performed better than their control counterparts. Additionally, there is a significant main effect for the STEM school participants overall compared to the traditional school participants. Effectiveness of implementation intention encoding suggests that it would be beneficial for educators to incorporate the strategy into instruction to produce self-regulated mathematical learners.