The Social Dynamics of Mathematics Coursetaking in High School

Abstract

This study examines how high school boys' and girls' academic effort, in the form of math coursetaking, is influenced by members of their social contexts. The authors argue that adolescents' social contexts are defined, in part, by clusters of students (termed "local positions") who take courses that differentiate them from others. Using course transcript data from the recent Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study, the authors employ a new network algorithm to identify local positions in 78 high schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Incorporating the local positions into multilevel models of math coursetaking, the authors find that girls are highly responsive to the social norms in their local positions, which contributes to homogeneity within and heterogeneity between local positions.The adolescent is choosing how to invest time, and … the choices depend greatly on the social system surrounding them. (Coleman 1996, p. 346) This study examines how high school boys' and girls' academic effort, in the form of mathematics coursetaking, is influenced by their social contexts. The literature on sociology of education has established how adolescent coursetaking is influenced by schools' decisions and resource allocations (e.g., Natriello, Pallas, and Alexander 1989;Hallinan 1991;Useem 1992). Other sociologists have described education, independent of the school's function as a social institution, in terms of status attainment, arguing that adolescents and young adults are influenced by their parents' education, occupations, and aspirations (Sewell and Hauser 1976;Steelman and Powell 1991). Complementing status attainment theory, standard economic models directly address parents' motivations for investing in their children for long- (Adelman 1999). But, as implied by Coleman's quote in the epigraph above, while adolescents may be influenced by adults, including school faculty, administrators, and parents, they may also respond to their peers in making short-and longterm educational decisions (see also Sizer 1984;Crosnoe, Cavanagh, and Elder 2003; RiegleCrumb, Farkas, and Muller 2006). In this article we examine how an adolescent may be influenced in particular by the cluster of students with whom she takes courses-which we term the local position. NIH Public AccessWe focus specifically on effort in the domain of math coursetaking for four reasons. First, math has gained increasing attention in the popular press (e. Simpkins, Davis-Kean, and Eccles 2006) for its potential contributions to society. Second, math is an important gateway to other advanced courses and college entry and therefore to pursuing human capital (Sells 1973;Adelman 1999;Simpkins et al. 2006;Sadler and Tai 2007). Third, math has long been a key to the social organization of the school, as it is used to delineate academic tracks (Stevenson, Schiller, and Schneider 1994;Gamoran and Hannigan 2000;Lucas and Good 2001). Fourth, although math coursetaking has been the focus of considerable empirical study, ...

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