Relationship Between Student Noncognitive Factors and Mathematics Achievement: Analysis of NAEP 2017 Mathematics Assessment

• In Event: Contextualizing Student Academic Success: Using NAEP Data to Understand Student Achievement

Abstract

Preparing students for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) areas is critical for students to be successful in the 21st-century workforce and for the U.S. to stay competitive in a global economy (U.S. Department of Education, 2007). A strong foundation in STEM-related content is essential for students to continue developing their interest and skills in STEM. Middle school is especially an important transition period as students begin to take more advanced courses in the STEM area, and often many students start losing interest in STEM due to the increased difficulty of STEM subjects (Koller, Baurnert, & Schnabel, 2001).

With an increased emphasis in STEM education, the comparison of 2007 and 2017 NAEP mathematics scores for eighth-graders shows a slight increase for both male and female students, and the gender gap has decreased significantly between the two years, with the 2017 gender gap on the NAEP mathematics assessment being non-significant. Despite these patterns, research suggests that females are less likely to receive STEM-related degrees in postsecondary institutions (Snyder, Brey, & Sally, 2016), and such underrepresentation of females in the STEM fields has been persistent. One potential reason for these findings could be greater loss of interest for female students in mathematics as students continue their education (Choney, 2018; Koller, Baurnert, & Schnabel, 2001).

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between students’ noncognitive factors (e.g., persistence) and academic achievement (Payton et al., 2008). However, most of the previous studies used local/regional samples, lacking generalizability at the national level. NAEP, the nation’s largest assessment of U.S. students’ academic proficiency, began collecting data on students’ noncognitive factors including mathematics interest and persistence to shed light on how these noncognitive factors related to student achievement (see Appendix A for example survey questions). This proposed study utilizes the NAEP 2017 mathematics assessment data to examine the relationship between noncognitive factors and mathematics achievement, which allows findings to be generalizable at the national level.

Descriptive analysis of the national public-school sample indicates that students with a high level of enjoyment of complex problems (ECP), mathematics interests (MI), and persistence in learning (PL) scored significantly higher in the NAEP mathematics assessment compared to those with a moderate and low level in respective areas. For gender comparison, while the difference in mathematics achievement was not significant, male students in the high-level category in the ECP and MI indices outperformed female students in the same category, but the same pattern was not observed for the low category. Comparing percentage distribution of these indices, while the percentage of the high category for male students was higher for the ECP and MI indices, the percentage of the high category for the PL index was higher for female students (see Table 2). Building upon these preliminary findings, the final paper will include results from regression and path analyses, examining how these noncognitive factors are related to each other and to mathematics achievement. Additionally, multiple group comparisons will be conducted to examine whether the magnitude of these relationships vary by gender.

Authors

• Bitnara Jasmine Park, American Institutes for Research

• Mary Smith, American Institutes for Research

• Grace Ji, American Institutes for Research