The Relationship Between Rates of Advanced Math Achievement and Time Spent in School: A Multilevel Exploratory Analysis

• In Event: 18.062 - Predicting Growth, Achievement, and Creativity: Conceptual and Methodological Advances

Abstract

Despite educational reform efforts over the last decade, the education of advanced students has received little attention. Excellence gaps are the difference between proportions of subgroups of students performing at the highest levels of achievement. Using math achievement data from approximately 84,000 students across 47 states, we examined the magnitude of mathematics excellence gaps and how they change during the school year and summer and due to other school-level variables. Multilevel modeling results suggest excellence gaps vary widely across schools and as students progress through the elementary grades. The average achievement the school was also statistically significant with overall high achieving schools seeing larger gaps that grew over the course of the school year only to shrink over the summer.

Authors

• Scott Joseph Peters, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater

• Karen E. Rambo-Hernandez, West Virginia University

• Jonathan A. Plucker, Johns Hopkins University