Turnaround Students in High School Mathematics: Constructing Identities of Competence Through Mathematical Worlds

Abstract

This analysis joins together two lines of work: research on students' mathematical identities and on curricular organization that supports equitable academic outcomes. This article conceptualizes students' sense of mathematical competence as emerging through the interaction between their extant identities and the mathematical worlds they encounter in the school. Using data from a five-year mixed-methods longitudinal study comparing students' mathematical experiences in two high schools (Boaler, 2006), I focus on seven students who showed initial and unexpected success in mathematics. One department provided more resources for students to develop identities of mathematical competence, while the second department naturalized differential outcomes for students. An examination of two student trajectories, one from each school, illustrates how mathematical identities were constructed across, as well as within, classrooms. I argue that students' mathematical identities emerge beyond a single classroom, and to achieve equitable outcomes, we must look not only at the work of individual teachers but also at teacher collectives who support mathematical achievement.

This study was funded by an AERA/IES Postdoctoral Fellowship, under the mentorship of Jo Boaler. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2006 Annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco, California.

This article is dedicated to memory of my beloved brother, Jeremy Paster.

Notes

1. For more on conflicting identities in schooling, also see Noguera, 2003.

2. This is precisely the distinction reported by Stevenson & Stigler (1992) in the way Americans and Japanese make attributions about student success and failure.

3. Jo Boaler, Principal Investigator. Funded by the National Science Foundation.

4. I am grateful for the generosity of Jo Boaler, Melissa Gresalfi, Victoria Hand, Emily Shahin, Megan Staples, and Tobin White in sharing previously collected data as well as their insights into the places and people I encountered during the course of this study.

5. In compliance with our human subjects agreements, all proper names used here are pseudonyms.

6. I thank Lynée Lawson and Ashley Watson for their assistance in this part of the analysis.

7. For more on Ms. Nelson's classroom discourse, see Staples (2007). For more on Ms. Larimer's classroom discourse, see Horn (2005b).

8. I thank Monika Kasina for her assistance performing statistical analyses of the teacher survey data.

9. I am grateful to the research assistance of Alexander Crane, Laura Knudsen, and Joseph Sakshaug in the construction and analysis of this database.

10. “College readiness” meant the completion of third-year college preparatory mathematics with a grade of C or better, as is required in the state of California.