A team of researchers including Assistant Professor Kyo Yamashiro of Loyola Marymount University’s School of Education released a study that finds that students who take math classes in the 12th grade improve their chances of enrolling and continuing in higher education.
The researchers worked in partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District, as an affiliated project of the Los Angeles Education Research Institute (LAERI), to follow the educational pathways of nearly 27,000 students beginning in the 11th grade. Students who took a full year of math in the 12th grade were more likely to enroll in a four-year college and return for a second year, compared with academically similar peers who did not take math, the study indicates.
The study followed high school students who were academically similar at the end of their junior year to identify benefits from taking any kind of math class in 12th grade, including traditional offerings, such as precalculus, or alternatives such as statistics or data science. Though students who took 12th grade math experienced a slight reduction in their overall grade point average, the researchers identified positive effects on college enrollment and persistence.
“Because we found that taking any type of math senior year contributes to students’ college opportunities, this study points to the need to ensure that math course offerings include sufficient variety and pathways to reflect students’ interests and needs,” said Yamashiro.
Yamashiro also suggests, however, that increasing access is a very different policy strategy than increasing math graduation requirements or math college eligibility requirements, and cautions that requiring students to take more math may pose subsequent challenges and unintended consequences for students whose schedules are already crowded with requirements and/or other needs or interests.
About a quarter of the students in the study did not take math in 12th grade. To determine whether specific groups of students were less likely than their peers to enroll in these courses, the researchers examined differences by gender, ethnicity, English proficiency, and socioeconomic status.
“Access is critical not just between schools but within, as we found inequities in math course-taking amongst academically similar students in the same schools, including disparities by gender, race/ethnicity, parent/guardian education level, and English language learner status,” said Yamashiro. These differences across groups can be used to inform school supports in providing particular types of students additional access or encouragement to take 12th grade math courses.
Yamashiro collaborated with a team of researchers on this study, including Meredith Phillips, associate professor of public policy and sociology at UCLA and co-founder of LAERI; Leonard Wainstein, a former postdoctoral scholar at UCLA Luskin and a current faculty member at Reed College; Carrie Miller, LAERI’s associate director and a Ph.D. candidate at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies; and Tatiana Melguizo, professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and the Pullias Center for Higher Education. The study, “Twelfth Grade Math and College Access,” was funded by the Oakland-based nonprofit College Futures Foundation and grew out of the long-term research-practice partnership with L.A. Unified (LAERI), which Yamashiro co-founded and for which she served as the founding executive director.
A follow-up report is expected in early 2023 that looks more closely at how taking 12th grade math contributed to students’ performance while in college.
