Running Head: African American Students Performance in Mathematics 1

Running head: African American Students Performance In Mathematics 1

African American Students Performance In Mathematics

Mary Singleton

EDGR 601 Educational Research

Dr. Susan M. Featro

A Literature Review Presented to the Graduate Program in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of Masters in Education

Concordia University

2014

Literature Review

This literature review was undertaken in an effort to investigate the question: why do African American students perform poorly in higher level mathematics courses? There is a great deal of data which has been collected with respect to the mathematical achievement gap of African American students in higher level math courses. Many reasons have been put forward to explain this gap as it is of great interest to determine what major factors have been researched which contribute to African American student’s poor performance in higher level courses. As with nearly everything of great complexity, the answer is certainly also going to be complex. Within the literature reviewed there is some blame placed on schools and the teachers for low expectations and misplacement or off track placementwhilecultural differences of the African American students are another area of possible causefor the disparity between African American students and white students in higher level math courses. Racial stereotyping is considered to be another reason for the gap in mathematics put forth by the literature reviewed.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the gap between white and African Americans (public school students at grade 8) has widened between 1990 and 1992 (33 points), and remained the same (40 points) until 2003 when it narrowed to 35 points due to an increase in Black students’ scores. Surprisingly there is not much difference between the genders, nor was there a significant difference between those eligible for free or reduced price lunch and those who were not. Thus having basically eliminated socioeconomic reasons and gender reasons, the question still remains: why do African American students perform poorly in higher level mathematics courses?

Culture and Perceptions

Movement, community effort, “loud” discussions and more are part of both the reformation classroom as well as the African American culture. The culture of a mathematics classroom has historically not been remotely the same as the culture African American children are familiar with. Ladson-Billings (1997) explains why she believes that the culture of the math classroom does not connect with the learning culture of African American students. She claims that the African American culture is vocal and energetic with movement and communal efforts, but, as per Gutman (2006), even though the reformation in mathematics calls for the things that African American students value in a culture, they have already been chastised and set aside for misbehaviors in the pre-reformation classroom so they will continue to be on the outside of high level mathematics. He also predicts that should African American students be allowed to aim for mastery rather than rote memorization they will experience more success in mathematics.

The idea of an active and engaging classroom is not novel, but many authors like Efrat (2011) believe that intertwining learning with physical activity will increase testing performance and conceptual understanding. It can also have positive health benefits, which is imperative as many African American students are already overweight and/or at risk of being obese. Efrat (2011) conducted a review on the relationship between academic outcome and physical activity for minority students. While his meta-analysis does not consistently report statistically significant positive relationships between activity and outcomes, all the trends were positive. This just gives me further reasoning to create an educational experience, which is physically engaging, but also achievable for all those, involved. I believe the concepts of movement and play will serve as strong elements in my intervention design.

The first two studies discussed in the sub header above were successful both at the research represented in the articles as well as in their explanations. These two articles are encouraging to me for the future or reducing the mathematics gap of African American students and white students, and both will greatly help me in my research since I prepare to design an intervention to address these gaps, which have been created by cultural anomaly and lack of high achievement perceptions.

Racial Stereotype

Data substantiates that predetermined expectation of failure has affected the performance of African American students on standardized testing. Steele and Aronson (1995) gathered data from standardized tests which indicated that African American students did not do as well as white students on standardized tests. They thendesigned an experiment where they divided volunteer students into three groups. Each group was given different verbalpsychological predeterminations of how they would do on the test. Overall the black students (even with a positive predetermination) did less well than the white students. Although this study was focused on college age students, I think that my research will benefit all students, and other minority groups. It is tempting to replicate the experiment, but it would also be beneficial to simply add on the encouraging directions that they used in their experiment. If I can find additional information on high school age students who have perhaps confounded standardized testing that data may prove valuable mostly because I am looking for ways to improve the performance for all minority groups. I understand if high expectations are included in instructions, it is more likely that higher results will be obtained, but perhaps there are more similar results out there. Additional results found that there was stereotypical bias on the part of the student toward the type of test they were taking. For example, if they thought the test represented an examination of their psychomotor skills, they were likely to achieve higher than if they thought the test was testing their intelligence. This might fit in with my intervention design as an alternative was to make positive suggestions to the students regarding their possible performances.

An additional study by Catsambis (1994) on at standardized exams with regard to gender differences and did not find substantial differences between females and males. The study was inconclusive and did not directly give results connected to my study on the African American students’ gap in higher level mathematics. However, even though there were alarge number of reasons for the performance, this study may add some information regarding why the females showed less confidence and interest in mathematics than the males.

Catsambis (1994) brought up an interesting point for me; the differences in achievement levels of females and males in mathematics. To learn more about these differentials, I reviewed Schmader (2002). In Schmader’s study, participants are all male and female, and all white. They are administered an exam, and in the experimental groups, participants are told that they will be reviewing their scores and looking at their success and categorizing them by gender. One experimental group has to denote their gender and the other experimental group does not. Schmader (2002)’s study found that women with greater gender identification scored more poorly than those women with less gender identification, and males showed no differences with respect to achievement and gender identification intensity. This work highlights that as I form my experiment, I must consider the identification of the individuals and perhaps remove confounding variables from my study by only studying men, or studying an equal number of men and women, where the women have been screened for low gender identity. If I choose to use a study group with men and women, it would also be wise to include an ‘external handicap’ (Brown and Josephs 1999), as another mechanism to minimize confounding factors of gender and to hone in on predictors of success in African Americans’ mathematics achievement. When Brown and Josephs (1999) utilized an external handicap, overall performance increased and alleviated gender related setbacks.

Low Expectations, Course Sequencing and Misplacement

An article by Johnson and Kritsonis (2006) was perhaps the greatest affirmation to my previous thinking which I had before I began researching this topic. Their article also ties together the previous articles I have researched. In their article they give a fairly straightforward and easy to understand explanation as to why African American students currently face such a large gap with white students in higher level mathematics. Primarily it is because they are not expected to succeed and so they don’t and secondly because they appear to misbehave in a culturally foreign classroom so they have been left behind and placed in remedial math classes thus essentially barring them from the higher level courses. They support their conjectures through the research of others while commenting on the reasonableness of the conclusions reached. For example, they mention that a study concluded that students who participated in higher level science and math courses in high school felt more prepared to pursue degrees in science. All of this was nice to read, but not necessarily helpful to my research except for affirmation.

However, they do mention that many African American students who experience success in mathematics during their elementary and middle school years lose interest and confidence in high school. Perhaps, they asserted, this phenomenon is because of poor career guidance and so they do not look to the sciences. This makes them too late for the preparatory classes in high school which lead to careers in the sciences. This information, while only backed up by the research of others, is useful to my research because the clear way they stated the reasons for the gap in mathematics of African American students and I can look at these reasons to be sure that they are not included in the intervention I intend to design. Also, the information regarding the loss of interest of the middle school students may be useful to my research down the road.

Riegle-Crumb (2006) brings up some good questions about course sequencing and the math performance of African American and Latino students, which are measurable.The author’s first question asks whether or not students who are at the same level of math when they enter high school reach the same level when they end high school, and if gender is a causal factor, and secondly if a student does not reach the same level as the others who entered with them, is this solely because of academic performance or is there some reason based in race-ethnicity and/or gender. While the results of the study were solidly formed through a great deal of data accumulation and analysis, one of her results claimed that African American males were not very concerned over the relationship between their academic performance and their grades. This is very interesting in light of the research I am looking to perform, and perhaps will design the intervention to somehow break apart the connection between grades and academic performance.

Comments

Due to the lack of data on the restructured mathematics classroom spoken about here, and introduced into classrooms only for the past 5 years on a large scale, it is possible that there have been changes which have already been put in place to alter the achievement gap of African Americans in mathematics. However, it is my suspicion that because there was a lack of research found which follows the suggests for increasing the success of African Americans in high level classroomsi.e. new methods for teaching the African American student, that this research represented here will remain reliable and viable.

References

Brown, R. P., & Josephs, R. A. (1999). A burden of proof: Stereotype relevance and gender differences in math performance. Journal of personality and social psychology, 76(2), 246.

Catsambis Sophia. (1994). The Path to Math: Gender and Racial-Ethnic Differences in Mathematics Participation from Middle School to High School. Sociology of Education. 1994; 67(3):199–215.

Efrat, M. (2011). The relationship between low-income and minority children's physical activity and academic-related outcomes: a review of the literature. Health Education & Behavior, 1090198110375025.

Gutman, L. M. (2006). How students and parent goal orientations and classroom goal structures influence the math achievement of African Americans during the high school transition. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32(1), 44-63. DOI:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2005.01.004

Johnson, Clarence and Kritsonis, William. (2006). A National Dilemma: African American Students Underrepresented in Advanced Mathematics Courses. Web. Retrieved from

Ladson-Billings Gloria. (1997). It Doesn’t Add Up: African American Students’ Mathematics Achievement. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. 1997 December; 28:697–708.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (2011). Retrieved from

Riegle-Crumb, C. (2006). The Path through Math: Course Sequences and Academic Performance at the Intersection of Race-Ethnicity and Gender, American Journal of Education 113 (November 2006). doi:10.1086/506495

Schmader, T. (2002). Gender identification moderates stereotype threat effects on women's math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38(2), 194-201.

Steele, Claude and Aronson, Joshua (1995). Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1995, Vol. 69, No. 5, 797-811. DOI.10.1037/0022-3514.69.5.797