Guest Post: When Are Middle Schoolers Ready for Algebra?
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) held its annual meeting in San Francisco last week, and I asked The Hechinger Report's Jill Barshay-- and author of the new Education By the Numbers blog -- to share a guest post.
In a study of middle-school math education in a California school district, standardized test scores and grades were a much better predictor of whether a student would pass eighth-grade algebra than whether his seventh-grade math teacher thought he was ready for it. That’s according to an unpublished paper, The Missing Link in Algebra Policy Analysis: A Case Study of Placement in Eighth-Grade Algebra by Andrew Thomas (Walden University), Michael H. Butler (Public Works, Inc.), Robert Kaplinsky (Downey Unified School District) presented at the AERA annual meeting.
The issue of when a student takes his first algebra course is of great interest to academic scholars and policy makers. Some theorize that taking algebra early in eighth grade will lead to more students taking advanced math
The issue of when a student takes his first algebra course is of great interest to academic scholars and policy makers. Some theorize that taking algebra early in eighth grade will lead to more students taking advanced math