Racial and gender disparities in elementary mathematics

Abstract

Disparities in Mathematics performance have been shown across race and gender for decades, although little research has reported the race by gender nexus in terms of disparity. In turn, research done to ameliorate these disparities have assumed that these differences are primarily among student populations who need remedial learning improvement. In this research, we test these assumptions by using multinomial regression analyses and adjusted mean comparisons with bias-corrected effect sizes from a data set of ~20,000 2nd grade students in Chicago. Further, we contribute to previous elementary Mathematics research by illuminating the powerful impacts that spatial reasoning integrations into Mathematics curriculum and pedagogy can have for all students' learning. Our findings provide empirical support that even after accounting for the effects of school composition, racial disparities exist in the beginning and persist throughout the year, among 2nd grade students. However, upon disaggregating students by race, gender, and median split, such disparities are greatest among students that are above the median. Our results encourage quantitative research analyses that explore ways to reduce Mathematics disparities to sharpen their approaches to be more sensitive to the achievement levels of students among such equity inquiries.

Identity Making as a Colonization Process, and the Power of Disability Justice to Cultivate Intersectional Disobedience

“…Bringing to bare the foundations upon which intersectionality rests also encourages me to take up the term sparingly, at most, and to be purposeful in my use. In other words, most of the work I do I would not categorize as intersectional, even though I have looked closely at the complexity within racial categories in terms of gender differences through quantitative analyses [24]. These projects and partnerships do not originate their research commitments from intersectional traditions on the outset when designing their structures and purposes and, therefore, just because I look at the overlapping identity nexus among races and genders does not mean that this work is of a tradition that could be defined as intersectional.…”