Millions of American high school students annually participate in preparatory coursework intended to build and document their readiness for college, including Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and dual enrollment. Research generally shows a correlation between successful completion of this coursework and postsecondary success, but there are gaps in outcomes for certain students that have so far gone unexplained. A new study theorizes that student perceptions of readiness might play a role in boosting or decreasing the effects of college preparation work.
A group of researchers from Oakland University in Michigan recruited 339 first-year college students from across the country between September and November of 2022 via an online data collection platform. They focused specifically on students with an interest in STEM fields—such as healthcare, biomed, medicine, or physical, chemical, and biological sciences—due to recent increases in college-preparatory activities in these fields. The majority of students in the sample (56 percent) were first-generation college students. Thirty-nine percent were White, 33 percent were Black, and 29 percent were Hispanic. Fifty-four percent were female. The vast majority (71 percent) reported a household income lower than $75,000 per year. Individuals hailed from forty states and the District of Columbia. Although participants were accepted for the study regardless of their educational experiences prior to college, as part of the demographic data gathered students were asked about participation in AP and IB programs, as well as any dual-enrollment courses taken while in high school. Treated as a unit (as this report does), 58 percent of students in the sample reported either AP or IB participation, and 60 percent reported dual-enrollment participation. These are not mutually exclusive groups, but it is not noted how many students reported participation in both types of programs.
The survey administered by the researchers also asked about students’ experiences with several specific types of extracurricular STEM programs (science fairs, Math Olympics, Science Olympics, robotic clubs or competitions, and afterschool or summer-break STEM or health-related camps), as well as more general exposure to what are termed outreach and pathway programs (OPP). These include recruiting activities designed to introduce secondary students to the STEM and/or medical fields. Open-ended survey questions included details on programs experienced, the amount of time spent pursuing them, and particulars about the activities. Most importantly, all students were asked if they felt prepared for college—a simple yes/no question.
Approximately 84 percent of students in the sample responded that they felt prepared for college. The researchers found that, while neither race, ethnicity, income, nor first-generation status correlated with those perceptions, exposure to STEM while in high school did. Specifically, student participation in OPPs and dual enrollment were predictive of higher perceptions of college readiness, as opposed to AP/IB participation or no participation at all. Their predictive validity was almost exclusively driven by students who lived in low-income zip codes.
Digging deeper into OPP participation, a far less studied area of college preparation than the others due to its generally ad hoc and extracurricular nature, 279 students reported having had at least one OPP experience during high school, with 217 (78 percent) stating that they obtained at least one skill as a result of the experience. From the detailed responses, the researchers identified 206 “skills” and mapped them to researcher David Conley’s principles of college readiness (or “other” if they did not fit the predefined categories). Content knowledge (28 percent), learning skills/techniques (23 percent), and cognitive strategies (20 percent) were the most-common skills cited by OPP participants. (If you want detail, the report includes examples of student responses.)
The bottom line is that most first-year college students felt prepared for the labor ahead, but formal programs seemed to give students less (or little) of a boost of confidence than would be expected. Mechanisms are murky, given the limits of the data, and researchers spend more time speculating why AP/IB participation isn’t predictive of feelings of preparedness (suppositions include too few courses taken and/or courses completed without taking the final test) than why dual enrollment and OPPs are predictive. Dual enrollment is generally well-studied elsewhere in this regard, but OPP participation could be a relatively-unheralded gateway to helping high schoolers feel prepared for college. This would be good news indeed because OPPs offer a wider variety of activities with less formal structures than any of the other college-preparatory coursework noted. Sororities, governmental agencies, unions, employers, community organizations, and, of course, colleges themselves have all been active in bringing STEM (especially) outreach programming to students, generally after school or in the summer and often free of charge. This research would indicate that such efforts are having a surprisingly positive impact.
Of course, there’s no way to tell from this research whether the first-year college students were actually prepared to do well in higher education, regardless of their own perceptions thereto. Only by following them through college to observe class grades, test scores, GPA, persistence, and completion can we truly map the pathway from preparation to success.
SOURCE: Akshata R. Naik et al., “A preliminary study of educational experiences that promote perceptions of college readiness in individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds interested in pursuing a career in science, technology, engineering, math, or medicine (STEMM),” Frontiers in Education (September 2024).
