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Algebra by the Eighth Grade: The Association Between Early Study of Algebra I and Students’ Academic Success

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Abstract

Using the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we examine the association between taking Algebra I by the eighth grade and students’ later achievements and advanced mathematics course-taking. To explore our research questions, we employ three distinct methods—regression analysis, fixed effects models, and propensity score matching. In all our analytic models, we consistently found that students who have taken Algebra I by the eighth grade are more likely to have higher achievements in the ninth and eleventh grades and to take classes beyond Calculus during high school. Although the study is correlational, considering the increasing number of students taking Algebra I by the eighth grade, its findings have meaningful implications for education policy, research, and practice.

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Notes

  1. For our probit regression, the following equation was estimated for student i in school j: Pr (calculus or aboveij = 1) = Φ(β0 + β1EAij + β2Sij + β3SCij + εij)

  2. Multiple imputation has been shown to adequately address the missing observation in the data when performing PSM (Mattei, 2009). We conducted matching and estimated our results independently on each of the five imputed datasets, and then pooled the results according to Rubin’s rule (Rubin, 1987).

  3. We ran the analysis with both five strata and 32 strata, and found similar trends and narratives. In this paper, we report results based on 32 strata.

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Dr. Se Woong Lee received a grant from the University of Missouri System Research Board.

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  1. Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 202 Hill Hall, Columbia, MO, 65201, USA

    Se Woong Lee & Xinyi Mao

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Lee, S.W., Mao, X. Algebra by the Eighth Grade: The Association Between Early Study of Algebra I and Students’ Academic Success. Int J of Sci and Math Educ 19, 1271–1289 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-020-10116-3

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