Recognizing and Developing STEM Talent Among Diverse Populations

STEM talent is often overlooked in underrepresented students resulting in limited opportunities to increase STEM interest and talent inside or outside of school settings. Academically qualified underrepresented students are less likely to be recommended for advanced placement STEM courses causing a racial divide and contributing to a lack of belonging in these courses. Methods to encourage STEM talent development and persistence in students from underrepresented populations include frontloading talent development interventions, creating afterschool or informal STEM programs, providing enrichment opportunities for highly capable students, and creating equitable access to advanced courses. This chapter presents the characteristics of STEM talent in underrepresented populations and strategies to identify high potential students, provides frontloading examples to develop STEM talent, offers examples of effective programming, and suggests instructional strategies to encourage STEM talent development in diverse populations.

Gordon Keith Chalmers and the Politics of Advanced Placement

This article investigates the role of mid-century conservatism in shaping the College Board's Advanced Placement program. Kenyon president Gordon Keith Chalmers and superintendent of New Trier public schools William Cornog, who led the committee that directly gave rise to the AP Program, understood themselves as classically liberal but socially conservative, and their proposed program was rooted in principles associated with that movement. In keeping with other mid-century conservative thinkers, they promoted humanistic inquiry that introduced all American students, regardless of backgrounds, to the notion of individual freedom, in spaces set apart from economic activity. This article explains that Chalmers and Cornog agreed that schools should focus on reinforcing and transmitting a distinctly American heritage of constitutionalism, individualism, and universal morality by way of the liberal arts. The article ends by establishing how this ideological framing contradicts the Advanced Placement program's current shape.

Disruptiveness of COVID-19: Differences in Course Engagement, Self-appraisal, and Learning

We investigated how the transition to remote instruction amidst the COVID-19 pandemic affected students’ engagement, self-appraisals, and learning in advanced placement (AP) Statistics courses. Participants included 681 (Mage=16.7 years, SDage=.90; %female=55.4) students enrolled in the course during 2017-2018 (N=266), 2018-2019 (N=200), and the pandemic-affected 2019-2020 (N=215) year. Students enrolled during the pandemic-affected year reported a greater improvement in affective engagement but a decrease in cognitive engagement in the spring semester relative to a previous year. Females enrolled in the pandemic-affected year experienced a greater negative change in affective and behavioral engagement. Students enrolled during the pandemic-affected year reported a greater decrease in their anticipated AP exam scores and received lower scores on a practice exam aligned with the AP exam compared to a prior year. Though resilient in some respects, students’ self-appraisal and learning appeared negatively affected by pandemic circumstances.

Using Science Standards to guide the development of high school linguistics

As the linguistics community is pushing for more introductory classes to be taught at the high school level, it is useful to create a course framework. This framework can help provide structure for a potential Advanced Placement (AP) test and course as well as help interested teachers create successful proposals to add linguistics to their school’s course offerings. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I suggest that the existing Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are an ideal starting point. Although not a science in the traditional secondary school sense, there is considerable overlap in methodology. Using the language of science can help those unfamiliar with linguistics see that it is the systematic study of language rather than just language learning, as well as help students transfer some of the skills and knowledge of practices that they already know from previous classes. This paper serves as an introduction to NGSS and the connections between the existing science standards and methodologies with the goal of demonstrating their usefulness for creating standards for linguistics.

College Comes to High School: Participation and Performance in Tennessee’s Innovative Wave of Dual-Credit Courses

We analyze the rollout of a Statewide Dual-Credit (SDC) program intended to expand access to college-level courses during high school. We find that SDC increased early postsecondary course-taking among students in the middle of the achievement distribution, especially through courses in vocational subjects, without decreasing participation in Advanced Placement (AP). However, SDC was mostly offered by schools already providing courses in similar subject areas and was less frequently offered in small relative to large schools, thus doing little to ameliorate placed-based gaps in course-taking opportunities. Furthermore, a majority of students failed the end-of-course exams necessary to secure college credit, and those who passed closely resemble students who pass AP exams. Low SDC exam pass rates predict school-level discontinuation of SDC courses over and above a range of other factors that reflect student demand and staffing capacity.

Will We Ever Close the Gender Gap Among Top Mathematics Achievers? Analysis of Recent Trends by Race in Advanced Placement (AP) Exams

Analyzing the test scores of more than 10,000,000 students who participated in the Advanced Placement (AP) math exams from 1997 to 2019, this study examined the direction and magnitude of the trend in gender disparity by race in participation in and top achievement on AP Calculus AB, Calculus BC, and Statistics exams. The results of this study indicated that, in general, females’ representation in all three AP exams increased significantly. Although the findings indicated that the female-to-male ratios (FMRs) in participation in the AP math exams increased significantly from 1997 to 2019 and favored females for all races, the gender disparities among top achievers for all math exams are still substantial. The relationships between the FMRs in participation and top achievement for all AP math exams were also analyzed within races, and the possible impacts of these findings within the context of the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields were also discussed.