Abstract
Hello, and welcome to the first issue of Volume 26 of the Journal of Advanced Academics! Following on the heels of two marvelous guest-edited special issues in Volume 25, and with another big thank-you to our guest editors for these efforts, we now take you back to our regularly scheduled programming. In this issue, as it happens, all three of our articles focus on mathematics in relation to advanced academics.
In this issue’s lead article, Teachers see what ability scores cannot: Predicting student performance with challenging mathematics, Jennifer Foreman and Jean Gubbins consider the contribution of teacher nominations to the identification of students’ potential for advanced achievement in mathematics. Second grade students whose teachers nominated them as among the top quarter in learning potential outscored students from the same classrooms who had not been among this group, on a measure of higher-order mathematical problem solving administered during their third grade year. Importantly, the teachers’nominations contributed additional predictive power after correcting for students’ prior scores on a pretest measure of cognitive reasoning. Thus, this work contributes to the broader debate in the literature over the role of teacher nominations in gifted identification.
In this issue’s second article, Christine Trinter, Tonya Moon, and Catherine Brighton examine how students’ responses to a mathematics curriculum based in problem-based learning can help in identifying students who demonstrate potential for high mathematics achievement. Their study, Characteristics of students’ mathematical promise when engaging with problem-based learning units in primary classrooms, also finds support for prior work by Sheffield on the characteristics of mathematically promising students.
Finally, in Unifying the algebra for all movement, Colleen Eddy and her colleagues examine the aspects held in common across a broad sample of curricular standards in Algebra to determine the features that different stakeholders’ visions of this important gateway course hold in common. Their analysis identifies six key ideas that unify existing algebra standards and frameworks, thereby suggesting directions for future work within this important content area.
In an exciting development, one that we and the previous editors have been working toward for several years, we are making progress toward the goal of applying for an SSCI Impact Factor listing for the Journal of Advanced Academics. If you will be attending this year’s American Educational Research Association conference in Chicago in April, please attend our editorial board meeting to hear more about this process and where we are in it. Finally, once again we would like to thank the many reviewers who have contributed their expertise to the Journal during the past year, and we remind our readers that we look forward to receiving your manuscripts on topics relevant to the many facets of advanced academics.