The role that mathematics plays in college- and career-readiness: evidence from PISA

Many studies have found a strong relationship between the mathematics students study in school and their performance on an academic or school mathematics assessment but not on an assessment of mathematics literacy (ML). With many countries, like the USA, placing emphasis on finishing secondary education being mathematically literate and prepared for college or career, this raises the question about the relationship between the mathematics studied in school and any ML students may have. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ML assessment is embedded in real-world contexts that provide an important window on how ready students are to tackle the situations and problems that await them whether they intend to pursue further education beyond high school or intend to go directly into the labour force. In this paper, we draw upon the PISA 2012 data to investigate the extent to which the cumulative exposure to rigorous mathematics content, such as that embedded in college- and career-ready standards, is associated with ML as assessed in PISA. Results reveal that both exposure to rigorous school mathematics and experiencing the instruction of this mathematics through real-world applications are significantly related to all the real-world contextualized PISA ML scores.