Open Collections

Remedial summer school: an effective alterntive to retention for secondary mathematics students?

University of British Columbia

Students who fail a compulsory course at the secondary level are almost always required to repeat the course the following school year. The literature on retention, however, suggests that this is not a helpful practice. Remedial summer school is an alternative to retention for secondary students. The purpose of the present study was to provide some evidence to support or refute the practice of remedial summer school as an alternative to retention for secondary mathematics students. The study examined the subsequent mathematics achievement of students who had receive incomplete marks in Mathematics 8 during the 1992-93 school year. An ex post facto design was used to compare Mathematics 9 achievement among three groups of students who received incomplete marks in Mathematics 8. The original data analysis, based on dependent samples t-tests, was impossible to complete because of the small number that remained in the sample. However, non-parametric analyses using chisquare tests were conducted on the data and provided information useful to the purpose of the study. For students who received incomplete marks in Mathematics 8, those who participated in summer school were more likely to continue to be enrolled in the district and enrolled in Mathematics 9 than those who did not participate in summer school. However, summer school was not related to passing marks in Mathematics 9. Fifty-five percent of the students who passed Mathematics 8 in summer school failed Mathematics 9 the next year. Participation in summer school did not enable most students to successfully complete Mathematics 8. Summer school may help keep students enrolled in the district and in the regular mathematics stream, but not help them pass Mathematics 9. Recommendations for future practice include early identification of students' learning difficulties in order to provide appropriate remediation techniques and prevent failure. More extensive use of adaptive and modified curriculum as defined in The Special Education Services Manual of Policies, Procedures and Guidelines (Ministry of Education, 1994) is recommended.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-02-06

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/4250

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace