Although teacher tracking in mathematics is a phenomenon broadly recognized by practitioners, the call of education reformers and experts declare a need to de-track secondary teachers to balance teaching assignments, there is a dearth of empirical research examining the effects of mathematics teacher tracking. To this end, our study examines factors relevant to teachers’ disposition to course assignments and in turn, student assignments, such as collective responsibility and self-efficacy in relation to course assignments. Moreover, to account for the unique realities of teacher setting, we further examine the influence of teacher locales, such as urban compared to non-urban, on self-efficacy and collective responsibility. Our study examines the public HSLS:09 mathematics teacher survey data (n=17,882) using a logistic regression analysis. Similar to advanced mathematics placement yielding positive student outcomes, our results indicate that mathematics teacher track assignment has a significant influence on self-efficacy and collective responsibility. Whereas the locale of urban setting had no significant difference in teacher self-efficacy and collective responsibility. Framing this study through the lens of EVT, we believe that future research should further investigate the nature of the relationship between teachers’ course assignment and self-efficacy and collective responsibility as well as expectations for students.
Edosomwan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.