New grant to allow study of how L.A. students learn math

Tatiana Melguizo will join a team of education researchers and practitioners to investigate students’ educational pathways from middle school to college.

Are middle school students placed in honors math more likely to declare STEM majors in college? Do specific high school math courses help struggling students successfully transition to college-level math? Is a high school student who takes financial algebra more likely to earn a college degree than one who takes traditional algebra? Answers to these and similar questions can help determine how best to support student achievement, yet many of these inquiries have not been explored in the Los Angeles public education system.

Now, the College Futures Foundation, which is dedicated to catalyzing systemic change to ensure equitable college access and success for low-income students and students of color throughout California, aims to help change that. The nonprofit organization has provided a $100,000 initial research planning grant to support the Math Pathways Project, a year-long effort to understand course-taking experiences of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. By studying the educational pathway from middle school into college, researchers will seek to identify promising pathways or interventions that may lead to students’ long-term success in college math. In addition to traditional courses, researchers will study L.A. Unified students’ participation in courses such as Transition to College Math and Statistics, a course offered at nearly 60 high schools, in partnership with California State University, Northridge.

Serving as the project’s co-principal investigator is Tatiana Melguizo, an associate professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and a researcher at the Pullias Center for Higher Education.

“Right now, we just don’t have enough information related to math course-taking patterns for L.A. Unified students to figure out which of the pathways are most beneficial or how the pathways could be improved,” Melguizo said. “This grant will help us identify the various math pathways students experience in middle and high school, so we can plan a more informed and robust longer-term study.”

Melguizo’s collaborators include two researchers from the Los Angeles Education Research Institute (LAERI): principal investigator Meredith Phillips, co-founder of LAERI and an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and co-principal investigator, Kyo Yamashiro, executive director of LAERI and an associate professor of education at Claremont Graduate University; and practitioners from L.A. Unified and the Los Angeles Community College District. Using previous research led by the three co-principal investigators as a starting point, the researchers and practitioners will leverage the grant to develop a longer-term study of math pathways that can help inform instructional practice and policy.

“We’re excited by the opportunity to partner across local universities, and with key L.A. Unified leaders and practitioners, to ensure that we bring the best combination of expertise and community knowledge to bear on the research questions,” Phillips said. “This study will be conducted under the LAERI research-practice partnership framework, which means that researchers and practitioners will collaborate at all stages of the project, with the goal of making the research useful to the school district.”

“This grant will build on our existing research-practice partnership with LAERI, by digging into our students’ math experience and learning more about how we are preparing them for future college success,” said Frances Gipson, L.A. Unified’s chief academic officer. “We look forward to learning together, with our research partners, to inform our practices supporting our students’ success once they leave our schools.”

This study continues Melguizo’s ongoing research on public policy and community colleges, with a focus on the persistence and educational outcomes of minority and low-income students.