The Social Dynamics of Mathematics

This study examines how high school boys ’ and girls ’ academic effort, in the form of math coursetaking, is influenced by members of their social contexts. The authors argue that adolescents ’ social contexts are defined, in part, by clusters of students (termed “local positions”) who take courses that differentiate them from others. Using course transcript data from the recent Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study, the authors employ a new network algorithm to identify local positions in 78 high schools in the Na-tional Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Incorporating the local positions into multilevel models of math coursetaking, the au-thors find that girls are highly responsive to the social norms in their local positions, which contributes to homogeneity within and het-erogeneity between local positions. “The adolescent is choosing how to invest time, and... the choices depend greatly on the social system surrounding them” (Coleman 1996, p. 346). This study examines how high school boys ’ and girls ’ academic effort, in the form of mathematics coursetaking, is influenced by their social con-texts. The literature on sociology of education has established how ado