The Performance of Academic and Vocational High School Pupils on the Cooperative Mathematics Test

It is commonplace in educational thinking to accept, without reflection, the observation that academic high school students enrolled in courses in mathematics will show better achievement than pupils completing the same basic courses in a vocational high school. Such comparisons, of course, do not take into consideration the basic inequality in intellectual status which characterize the two groups of students. Any approach to a consideration of the relative achievement of academic and vocational school pupils should, if one is to arrive at valid conclusions concerning the effectiveness of student mastery of skills and knowledges in mathematics, be based upon a comparison of pupils of equivalent intellectual ability.