Title: Reversing the math trajectory
Description: This qualitative study investigates the mathematics success of nine African-American high school students in three urban, magnet high schools that serve large numbers of African-American students. These nine students are all enrolled and succeeding in Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus AB. Using in-depth interviews, as well as supporting documentation, this research project addressed the question: How do African-American students enrolled and succeeding in AP calculus describe and account for the factors that have helped them to achieve this level of advanced course-taking in an urban public high school? To further focus this study, I explored the following sub-questions: (1) What factors do these mathematically successful African-American students report as influencing their decisions to take advanced mathematics courses? (2) What factors of support do these students report as being instrumental to their success with school mathematics? Once they are enrolled in the advanced mathematics course, what supports help to sustain their achievement? (3) What barriers, stereotypes, and/or obstacles have these African-American students faced in their schooling and mathematical experiences, and how have they dealt with them?

The findings corroborate earlier research studies indicating that school-level factors are critical to the mathematics success of African-American students. A key finding in this study is that while a combination of personal, family, and academic factors inspired these students to achieve in mathematics, the variety of support structures in their small, magnet high schools were crucial to their success. The nine participants most strongly identified these structures as the following: teacher encouragement and high expectations, a competitive and challenging academic program, strong peer relationships, and an overall supportive school community. The major challenges identified by the participants included: growing up in a single-parent home, deaths in the home or community, high mobility, low teacher expectations in middle school, molestation, and gang violence. Despite these challenges, the magnet high schools provided the nine students with strategic opportunities and support mechanisms, enabling them to achieve at high levels of math. As a result, students were personally motivated, made informed and ambitious choices about their mathematics courses, developed focused study habits, and had positive peer associations. My research was undertaken in an effort to discover ways to support African-American students in reaching math parity. As such, the goal of this study is twofold: to provide practical information that math educators might find helpful to support mathematics success and the academic achievement of this population, and to address the paucity of research on mathematically successful African-American high school students.
Subjects: Academic achievement, African Americans, Education (Secondary), Education, Social aspects, Mathematics, Study and teaching, African American high school students, Attitudes
Places: United States