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Federal legislation has attempted to move career and technical education (CTE) from a segregated component of the high school curriculum to an integrated element that jointly improves both academic and career readiness. However, concerns remain about the ability of CTE to improve academic learning. Using a nationally representative sample of high school students, we examine the relationship between CTE coursework and mathematics achievement in high school. Accounting for observed and unobserved characteristics of students, we find that CTE courses neither limit overall gains in mathematics learning nor the acquisition of basic and intermediate mathematics skills.Additionally, engineering and technology courses, a subset of CTE courses that incorporate quantitative reasoning, logic, and problem solving, are unrelated with math achievement.

This study investigates the distribution of math teachers with a major or certification in math using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). The authors discuss the limitations of existing data sources for measuring teacher qualifications, such as the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), and show how HSLS:09 can be used to analyze the distribution of qualified teachers in mathematics. The results demonstrate that ninth-grade students in most need of a qualified math teacher are least likely to have one.

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This book provides an overview of recent research on the relationship between noncognitive attributes (motivation, self efficacy, resilience) and academic outcomes (such as grades or test scores). We focus primarily on how these sets of attributes are measured and how they relate to important academic outcomes. Noncognitive attributes are those academically and occupationally relevant skills and traits that are not “cognitive”—that is, not specifically intellectual or analytical in nature. We examine seven attributes in depth and critique the measurement approaches used by researchers and talk about how they can be improved.