Minority Students in Mathematics: The Reading Skills Connection

Abstract

The research discussed in this paper examined the performance of male and female minority students in the subject areas of mathematics and reading. The subjects for the study consisted of over one thousand junior and senior high school students who were enrolled in fifty‐nine different mathematics classes at eleven different schools across the country. Most of the students–69 percent–were of non‐minority background. Blacks represented the largest portion (87.6 percent) of the minority segment. The study had four objectives: (1) to compare the performance of minority students on achievement tests in mathematics with their performance on achievement tests in reading; (2) to compare the performance of minority students on achievement tests in mathematics and reading with the performance of non‐minority students in those tests; (3) to compare the performance of male minority students with that of female minority students; and (4) to consider the relationship between performance on achievement tests in reading and mathematics to course grade in mathematics. The overall purpose of the study was to further our understanding of the type of academic preparation occurring among pre‐college students from minority backgrounds.