Does the Level of Rigor of a High School Science Course Matter? An Investigation of the Relationship between Science Courses and First-Year College Outcomes. Research Report 2014-2

The focus of this research is to evaluate the relationship between advanced high school science courses and college outcomes, with a focus on the benefit of Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) participation and performance in comparison to other high school options (e.g., dual enrollment, honors, and regular science high school courses). Although there is a plethora of previous research comparing achievement-related outcomes of AP participation with other levels of high school course participation (e.g., honors course participation, dual enrollment), there has yet to be a study that compares achievement-related outcomes of AP, honors, dual enrollment, and regular science courses when using a rigorous statistical model. Multilevel modeling was employed to account for the nested structure of the data (i.e., students nested within colleges), and several student-level and college-level covariates were included in the model to provide a stringent test of these relationships. Overall, results suggest that higher performance in advanced science course work (e.g., AP) in high school is related to higher first-year GPA and higher first-year science GPA; as such, teachers should encourage students to participate in advanced high school science course work when planning their curriculum for science learning.