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 11 / 15 PLOS ONE Elementary Education Majors in General Education Science Courses graduation and, even then, could simply be at the level of making the grade rather than deeply understanding [79]. Future research should more directly explore elementary education majors’ perception of relevance in general education courses. Of primary interest is elementary education majors’ performance in science courses. It is notable that elementary education majors received grades comparable to STEM majors in Biology, while scoring worse than STEM majors in Physical Science. This difference suggests elementary education majors would benefit more from a specialized course in physical science than in biology. As such, elementary education programs seeking to provide a specialized science course [16,63,64] may want to prioritize a course in physical science. This may result from, or contribute to, elementary education majors’ preferential confi- dence in life sciences over physical sciences [33–35]. While not addressed with our data, it is possible that the differences we observed in Biology versus Physical Science could reflect broader trends in gender differences. Because most of the elementary education majors in our sample were surely female [36–38], it is reasonable to expect these data to reflect patterns from previous research. We do, in fact, observe this; past research has shown gender differences in STEM courses, with female students often receiving lower grades than male in STEM courses

[43–46]. However, even with receiving lower grades than STEM majors in Physical Science, elementary education majors scored above the average grades for students majoring in arts and communications, humanities, and social sciences, all of which likely have higher pro- portions of male students than elementary education majors. Thus, more research would be needed to clarify the relationships between elementary education major, gender, and perfor- mance in different types of STEM courses. Finally, it should be noted that elementary educa- tion majors only scored 0.074 grade points lower than STEM majors on average in Physical Science, which equates to less than a fourth of the difference between an A and A-. Thus, while statistically significant in our large dataset, it is not practically meaningful. It is important to note two other contextual factors that may influence these differences among majors. The first of these contextual factors is that some STEM majors are unlikely to complete Biology or Physical Science courses. Rather than completing the general education ver- sion of these courses, they are expected to complete the introductory course designed specifically for some majors (e.g., biology majors complete a majors-only introductory course instead of the general education Biology course). As such, STEM majors who completed Biology or Physical Science either were not majoring in the relevant STEM major or are students who changed majors after completing the general education course. The second contextual factor has to do

with the admissions requirements for business majors. At this institution, business majors have some of the most stringent program admissions requirements. Many students who apply for a business major will have completed these general education courses. Those who did not receive high grades in general education courses are unlikely to be admitted to the program. In addition to exploring elementary education majors’ perceptions of the relevance of gen- eral education courses, future research should examine other indicators of elementary teacher content learning in general education courses. While this study relies on grades, we acknowl- edge that other indicators of knowledge would provide additional evidence of the impact general education courses [22]. Further developing this knowledge would support efforts to better prepare elementary teachers with the science content knowledge they need for teaching children. Supporting information S1 File. Data set. Full data set analyzed for this study. (XLSX)