Fractions in College: How Basic Math Remediation Impacts Community College Students     

Ngo  Federick 《Research in higher education》2019,60(4):485-520

This study investigates the link between basic math skills, remediation, and the educational opportunity and outcomes of community college students. Capitalizing on a unique placement policy in one community college that assigns students to remedial coursework based on multiple math skill cutoffs, I first identify the skills that most commonly inhibit student access to higher-level math courses; these are procedural fluency with fractions and the ability to solve word problems. I then estimate the impact of “just missing” these skill cutoffs using multiple rating-score regression discontinuity design. Missing just one fractions question on the placement diagnostic, and therefore starting college in a lower-level math course, had negative effects on college persistence and attainment. Missing other skill cutoffs did not have the same impacts. The findings suggest the need to reconsider the specific math expectations that regulate access to college math coursework.

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Using a Regression Discontinuity Design to Estimate the Impact of Placement Decisions in Developmental Math     

Tatiana Melguizo  Johannes M. Bos  Federick Ngo  Nicholas Mills  George Prather 《Research in higher education》2016,57(2):123-151

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The distribution of pedagogical content knowledge in Cambodia: Gaps and thresholds in math achievement     

Federick J. Ngo 《Educational Research for Policy and Practice》2013,12(2):81-100

Increasing teacher quality is a major objective of recent Cambodian education policy. In mathematics education literature, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has emerged as a critical component of teacher quality that is strongly linked to student achievement. In this study I use data from a large survey of Cambodian schools to investigate the effect of math teachers’ PCK on third grade student achievement. I use ordinary least squares and Quantile Regression analyses to examine this aspect of teacher quality. I find that pedagogical knowledge is a strong predictor of student math achievement in Cambodia in comparison to other student, school, and background variables, but that the effect is concentrated among higher achieving students. Quantile Regression with this dataset also exposes gaps and thresholds in achievement associated with other explanatory variables. In addition, I investigate the proportional distribution of teacher PCK in Cambodia and find that lower quality teachers are more likely to be teaching lower achieving students of lower socioeconomic status.  相似文献