Comparing Academic Performance of Elementary Education Majors in General Education Science Courses

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320137 March 19, 2025 1 / 15 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Nixon RS, Bailey EG (2025) Comparing academic performance of elementary education majors in general education science courses. PLoS ONE 20(3): e0320137. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0320137 Editor: Miguel Ángel Queiruga-Dios, University of Burgos: Universidad de Burgos, SPAIN Received: October 9, 2024 Accepted: February 13, 2025 Published: March 19, 2025 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0320137 Copyright: © 2025 Nixon, Bailey. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. RESEARCH ARTICLE Comparing Academic Performance of Elementary Education Majors in General Education Science Courses Ryan S. Nixon 1*, Elizabeth Gibbons Bailey 2 1 Department of Teacher Education, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States of America, 2 Department of Biology, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, United States of America * rynixon@byu.edu Abstract It is important for elementary teachers to understand the content they are responsible for

teaching their students, known as content knowledge. In the content area of science, ele- mentary teacher preparation programs often expect preservice teachers to develop con- tent knowledge in college science courses completed prior to entering the program. These college science courses are often general education courses, not specifically designed for preservice elementary teachers. General education courses may not be adequately serving preservice elementary teachers. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of general education science courses on preservice elementary teachers, as compared to other students at the same institution. We collected student grades in six different general education courses across ten years of instruction, resulting in a data set with 195860 grades. These data were analyzed using linear mixed modeling to predict course grades in each of the individual courses. Overall, these findings indicate that elementary education majors in general education courses are receiving grades similar to students in most other majors. Notably, elementary education majors received grades comparable to STEM majors in Biology, while scoring worse than STEM majors in Physical Science. These findings assuage some concerns about the impact of general education courses on elementary education majors and suggest that elementary education programs seeking to provide a specialized science course may want to prioritize a course in physical science. Introduction It is important for elementary teachers to understand the content they are responsible for

teaching their students [1–3]. This knowledge, known as content knowledge or subject matter knowledge, includes having the skills (e.g., conventions of effective writing) [4] and under- standings (e.g., understanding photosynthesis and transpiration) [5] students are expected to learn. Content knowledge involves the teacher being able to “do the work that they assign their students” [6]. Research has found that teachers’ content knowledge impacts teach- ers’ self-efficacy [7], instructional practices [8,9], and students’ learning [10,11]. Of course, teachers must be knowledgeable and skillful in areas beyond the content (e.g., instructional