Search

Despite increases in the representation of African American and Hispanic youth in advanced math courses in high school over the past two decades, recent national reports indicate that substantial inequality in achievement remains. These inequalities can temper one's optimism about the degree to which the United States has made real progress toward educational equity. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), the authors find that the math achievement gap is most pronounced among those students who take the most demanding high school math classes, such as precalculus and calculus. The authors explore the roles of family socioeconomic status and school composition in explaining this pattern. Findings suggest that among those students reaching the advanced math high school stratum, Hispanic youth from low-income families and African American youth from segregated schools fare the worst in terms of closing the achievement gap with their white peers. The authors discuss potential explanations for the achievement differences observed and stress the need for more research that focuses explicitly on the factors that inhibit minority/majority parity at the top of the secondary curricular structure. Keywords math, course-taking, race-ethnicity, segregation, social class DOI: 10.1177/0038040710375689

Teachers and families are encouraged to work together to ensure that mathematical experiences are relevant and meaningful, while encouraging strong connections between home and school. Good relationships between teachers and families also empower children to explore and build a mathematical understanding of the world.

A longitudinal approach was used to examine the effects of parental task-intrinsic and task-extrinsic motivational practices on academic intrinsic motivation in the subject areas of math and science. Parental task-intrinsic practices comprise encouragement of children's pleasure and engagement in the learning process, whereas task-extrinsic practices comprise parents' provision of external rewards and consequences contingent on children's task performance. A conditional latent curve model was fit to data from the Fullerton Longitudinal Study (A. W. Gottfried, A. E. Gottfried, & D. W. Guerin, 2006), with academic intrinsic motivation in math and science assessed from ages 9 to 17 and parental motivational practices measured when children were age 9. The results indicated that task-intrinsic practices were beneficial with regard to children's initial levels of motivation at age 9 as well as with regard to motivational decline through age 17. Conversely, parents' use of task-extrinsic practices was adverse with regard to children's motivation both at age 9 and across the 8-year interval. Theoretical implications of the findings with regard to academic intrinsic motivation are discussed. Keywords: parental motivational practices, latent curve modeling, developmental motivational decline, math intrinsic motivation, science intrinsic motivation

Recent mathematics assessment findings indicate that Native American students tend to score below students of the ethnic majority. Findings suggest that students' beliefs about mathematics are significantly related to achievement outcomes. This study examined relations between self-beliefs and mathematics achievement for a national sample of 130 Grade 8 Native American students from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003 United States sample of (M age=14.2 yr., SD=0.5). Multiple regression indicated several significant relations of mathematics beliefs with achievement and accounted for 26.7% of the variance in test scores. Students who earned high test scores tended to hold more positive beliefs about their ability to learn mathematics quickly, while students who earned low scores expressed negative beliefs about their ability to learn new mathematics topics.

Research in cognitive neuroscience suggests that the brains of mathematically gifted children are quantitatively and qualitatively different from those of average math ability. Math-gifted children exhibit signs of enhanced right-hemisphere development, and when engaged in the thinking process, tend to rely on mental imagery. They further manifest heightened inter-hemispheric exchange of information between the left and right sides of the brain, reflecting an unusual degree of neural connectivity. Consequently, educators should develop instructional techniques that capitalize on the special learning styles of math-gifted children. Such methods may include multimodal lecture presentations and other classroom activities that highlight the use of visual images. Creating specialized outreach programs in math/science to provide supplemental learning experiences not often supplied by understaffed and underresourced school systems may prove particularly valuable to the development of math-gifted children. Until such measures are commonplace, society's best young thinkers risk underachievement. Policy changes are needed to address the needs of math-gifted children and to enhance their developmental well-being., A selective review of the cognitive neuroscience literature (Butterworth, 1999; Dehaene, 1997) yields support for a neurobiological foundation to exceptional mathematical ability. One proposed brain characteristic of math giftedness is [...]

The high school boys' and girls' academic effort in the form of mathematics coursetaking is influenced by the cluster of students with whom they take courses or social contexts or local positions is examined. Findings indicate that girls are highly responsive to the social norms in their local positions.

Abstract Teachers can draw on their care for students to promote more positive attitudes toward mathematics. Persistence in simultaneously caring for students and ideas holds generative possibility for challenging negative [...]

Ethnomathematics is the study of mathematical ideas and practices situated in their cultural context. Culturally Situated Design Tools (CSDTs) are web-based software applications that allow students to create simulations of cultural arts--Native American beadwork, African American cornrow hairstyles, urban graffiti, and so forth--using these underlying mathematical principles. This article is a review of the anthropological issues raised in the CSDT project: negotiating the representations of cultural knowledge during the design process with community members, negotiating pedagogical features with math teachers and their students, and reflecting on the software development itself as a cultural construction. The move from ethnomathematics to ethnocomputing results in an expressive computational medium that affords new opportunities to explore the relationships between youth identity and culture, the cultural construction of mathematics and computing, and the formation of cultural and technological hybridity. [Keywords: mathematics, computing, youth subculture, indigenous knowledge, identity]

In this study, we explored the possibility that when parents endorse particular academic gender stereotypes (e.g., boys are better at math, girls are better at English) they are more likely to engage in uninvited intrusions with homework, intrusions which then undermine children's confidence in these domains. Participants included 38 fifth to eighth grade students (mean age = 12.16 years, 60% girls, 87% White) and their mothers and fathers. The findings indicated that even though boys received more parental intrusive support with homework, girls were more sensitive to these intrusions, specifically when they involved math. Parents' intrusive support mediated the relationship between parents' math-related gender stereotypes and girls' math ability perceptions, which suggests that these behaviors communicate to girls their parents' math stereotype beliefs. KEY WORDS: gender stereotypes; parental intrusive support; math ability perceptions.

This longitudinal study tracked 1,110 adolescents identified as mathematically precocious at Age 13 (top 1%) with plans for a math-science undergraduate major. Participants' high school educational experiences, abilities, and interests predicted whether their attained undergraduate degrees were within math-science or nonmath-nonscience areas. More women than men eventually completed undergraduate degrees outside math-science, but many individuals who completed nonmath-nonscience degrees ultimately chose math-science occupations (and vice versa). At Age 33, the 2 degree groups reported commensurate and uniformly high levels of career satisfaction, success, and life satisfaction. Assessing individual differences is critical for modeling talent development and life satisfaction; it reveals that equal male-female representation across disciplines may not be as simple to accomplish as many policy discussions imply.

Significant mathematical developments throughout history have often been linked with social, economic or political developments. Mathematics teachers can play a part in making students aware of the way in which mathematics has been a product of cultural influences.

African-American educator and civil rights leader Robert P. Moses discusses the need for minority and poor children to learn algebra. Because of low expectations, minority children have not been encouraged to take algebra and lack of algebra training keeps them from taking higher mathematics and entering high technology industries.

Issues discussed concern the life and work of mathematician Grace Chisholm Young in England at the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the social aspects of women's education at that time. Topics addressed include women in higher education, gender roles, and how women achieved in mathematics because of the discipline's strict formality.

Mathematical principles behind certain card tricks are described. Tricks include taking cards out of a deck, replacing them, and later identifying the replaced cards using such principles as invariant pairs.

Through an analysis of gains in mathematics achievement between the tenth and twelfth grades for respondents to the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, we examine Coleman's explanation for why Catholic schools apparently produce more learning than public schools. According to Coleman, Catholic schools benefit from larger endowments of social capital, generated in part through greater intergenerational social closure (i.e., dense network connections between the parents of students). Instead, we find that for public schools, social closure among parents is negatively associated with achievement gains in mathematics, net of friendship density among students. This evidence of a negative effect of parental social closure within the public school sector lends support to our alternative hypothesis that horizon-expanding schools foster more learning than do norm-enforcing schools. Moreover, this result renders social closure incapable of explaining any portion of the Catholic school effect on learning, even though within the Catholic school sector there is some evidence that social closure is positively associated with learning.

The Connecticut Valley comprises two mathematical communities, one being the research sector and the other being high-school and middle-school teachers. Research mathematics remains a Valley industry despite the fact that the University of Massachusetts is the only one of five colleges that grants doctoral degrees. The second community is also lively with its own professional association, MathWest.

The cultures here in question are those of mathematics and of physics that I shall interpret with the goal of exploring different modes of creativity. As case studies I will [...]

Mathematics is rarely discussed as a component of the rise of civilization. On the contrary, mathematics has a significant influence in the general human condition, a fact that can be gleaned from the philosophies of Plato, Leibnitz and Spinoza. One aspect of mathematics that has received little or no notice at all is its relation to the crucial concept of evolution. Mathematics is also the only secular human activity that involves an element of the infinite.

In this ethnographic account of mathematical activity among the Juruna, Kayabi, and Suya of central Brazil, I show how arithmetic practices are fashioned in a specific social setting. Values and symbolic properties of both the gift exchange and capitalist economics structure arithmetic dilemmas in the Xingu Indian Park. Within a broad social field that transcends the boundaries of the park to include prospecting sites and cattle ranches, economic calculations are extended to all kinds of goods, both material and symbolic. The distribution and circulation of these different forms of capital are discussed in view of the constitution of particular arenas of exchange. Practice theories highlight the ways in which mathematical knowledge is constituted in everyday activities, challenging functional assumptions about cognition and schooling. By articulating principles of the gift with those of capitalist exchange, mathematics is construed by the Juruna, Kayabi, and Suya as a product of social work and symbolic fashioning. [mathematics, gift exchange, practice theories, cognition and schooling, Kayabi, Juruna, Suya, Xingu Indian Park]

Game theory served as a leading force to develop mathematics in the social sciences of the 1950s. Intellectual trends or research fronts combined with the research front of game theory between 1945 and the 1960s. One front was Kurt Lewin's team research and social experimentation school. Another front was the latent structure school of Paul Lazarsfeld and also the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Throughout history, mathematics has developed as part of humanity's search for patterns. When I explored mathematics in cultures East and West for my book Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History [...]

Byline: Janet Mannheimer Zydney, Cynthia Stegeman, Laura Bristol, Ted S. Hasselbring The purpose of this study was to develop and implement a multimedia learning environment in mathematics aimed to enhance students' learning, transfer, attitudes, and engagement. This multimedia learning environment included whole group instruction on mathematical concepts, a learning game, and group activities. The learning game used a variety of multimedia elements, including videos, animations, sound effects, text and interactive feedback. Fourteen elementary school students used the learning game as a review of material taught earlier in the year. The results indicated significant improvement in both achievement scores and attitude toward mathematics. The results, however, did not show the same benefits for the special education students. Qualitative analyses revealed a number of misconceptions and poor problem solving strategies that students used when transferring their knowledge to a novel situation. Enhancement of the learning environment and continuation of this research will work toward improving students' mathematical learning.

The formation of a language community in the United States by second-graders, teachers and teacher educators using mathematics pen pal letters is detailed. The pupils have focused their questions around interactions with their pen pals. The teachers, on the other hand, presented questions to every pen pal on a weekly basis.

The problems faced by students of low socioeconomic status (SES) and minorities in mathematics achievement are discussed. Appropriate instructional strategies needed to raise their standards in order to mitigate achievement gaps in schools are discussed.

We tested whether informing women about stereotype threat is a useful intervention to improve their performance in a threatening testing situation. Men and women completed difficult math problems described either as a problem-solving task or as a math test. In a third (teaching-intervention) condition, the test was also described as a math test, but participants were additionally informed that stereotype threat could interfere with women's math performance. Results showed that women performed worse than men when the problems were described as a math test (and stereotype threat was not discussed), but did not differ from men in the problem-solving condition or in the condition in which they learned about stereotype threat. For women, attributing anxiety to gender stereotypes was associated with lower performance in the math-test condition but improved performance in the teaching-intervention condition. The results suggest that teaching about stereotype threat might offer a practical means of reducing its detrimental effects.

Students and teachers who are looking for multicultural approaches to mathematics will find a wealth of Web sites at the homepage for the International Study Group on Ethnomathematics (ISGEm). These [...]

Mathematics is a vital aspect of culture. Mathematical principles may not in and of themselves be 'cultural,' but as soon as those principles are used by human beings, what is [...]

General semantics is also concerned with the science of man. Its special contribution is toward the study of the evaluative behavior of man. The most crucial and distinctive component of […]

One common attribute of a scientist is an unusually acute sense of numbers and their implications. I think it was Bertrand Russell who once observed that mankind would rather commit [...]