| Sukkyung You
University of California, Santa Barbara
Identifying factors affecting high school students' advanced mathematics course-taking
FINAL REPORT
High School math achievement predicts college attendance and career success. Although the gender gap in mathematics performance has narrowed, pathways to success are not well understood. With 16,373 diverse tenth grade participants of the 2002 Education Longitudinal Study, we used multi-level modeling to investigate the association between social capital and advanced mathematics course selection, controlling for family background and individual attitudes. To study the hypothesis that girls and boys arrive at similar math outcomes by different pathways, we examined relations between social capital and math course-taking by gender. Surprising and expected results were revealed and discussed. Girls were more likely to take advanced math than boys. Family background largely accounted for race differences in math choices although socioeconomic class and Asian race remained significant. Parent and peer expectations for academic progress were strongly related to math course selection. School-level resources including student/teacher ratio and teacher quality were significantly related to math course selection yet private school attendance was not. Gender equifinality was partially supported; results overlapped but were not entirely consistent for boys and girls.
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