British Educational Research Journal

In an era of a declining quality and quantity of students entering and persisting in mathematics in the USA, researchers and policy makers are looking for new strategies to engage students in these fields and improve mathematics outcomes. One push has been to make mathematics instruction more relevant with real‐world applications throughout the K‐12 curriculum—i.e. to make instruction more focused on real‐life situations. This empirical study examines specifically whether real‐life mathematics instruction can influence mathematics achievement for students at the beginning of the educational pipeline. Using a newly released national‐level dataset of a cohort of US kindergarten students, approximately ages 5–6 years old, from the 2010/11 school year (ECLS‐K:2011), the findings indicate a positive relationship between the frequency of real‐life mathematics instruction, as reported by the teacher and mathematics outcomes. The results are differentiated by student demographics, and implications are discussed.