Research on the Advanced Placement (AP) program
generally shows that students scoring 4s and 5s on AP exams outperform their
non-AP peers in subsequent college courses. However, faculty often advise
students with AP credit to repeat prerequisite courses in college before
attempting advanced coursework, and there are few studies that provide
empirical evidence about outcomes related to the use of AP credit. I compared grades
of 26,843 students in 34 STEM courses using two-level cross-sectional
multilevel modeling and found that students with AP credit in biology,
calculus, chemistry, or physics significantly outperformed non-AP students
after controlling for high school GPA and SAT Math scores, whether they used
their AP credit to fulfill course pre-requisites or not. Additionally, I
investigated outcomes of 10,152 students who had earned AP credit for course
pre-requisites, depending on whether or not they chose to use their AP credit
or repeat it at the college level prior to taking subsequent courses. I found
that contextual factors, such as the specific target course and the student’s
home college, were highly influential in determining the propensity to use AP
credit. Measures of prior academic achievement also influenced the propensity
to use AP credit, but most demographic factors did not. After applying
propensity weights, I found no causal effect of using AP credit on subsequent
course grades. The use of two-level cross-sectional multilevel modeling showed
that the effect of using AP credit on subsequent course grades varied
significantly across courses. The results of this study show that students who
use AP credit to move directly into subsequent college STEM courses do not earn
lower grades in those courses as a result of their decision to use AP credit.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/14402702 |
| Date | 07 May 2021 |
| Creators | Sheila F Hurt (10586288) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Investigating_the_relationship_between_the_use_of_advanced_placement_credit_and_performance_in_subsequent_college_courses/14402702 |
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