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 5 / 15 PLOS ONE Elementary Education Majors in General Education Science Courses request, we asked for data from students completing specific general education courses between 2009 – 2019 (data accessed on 6 July 2023). We chose these years because many of the students who completed these courses will be graduated at this point (and their major at graduation is one of the variables of interest). These years also avoid the emergency remote instruction that occurred during 2020 and 2021. As such, the results are not influenced by unusual instruction occurring during that time. Informed consent was not obtained from participants because data was completely de-identified, as approved by our institutional review board. We collected data from all sections of the following courses during these years: introduc- tory biology (Biology), introductory physical science (Physical Science), introductory statis- tics (Statistics), American history (History), western humanities (Humanities), and Human Development. Biology and Physical Science are among the most common science courses completed by elementary education majors at this university. Statistics is a mathematics- focused general education course completed by many elementary education majors. History and Humanities are non-science general education courses. Finally, Human Development is a social science course highly related to their future work as elementary teachers. We gathered the final letter grades in each of these courses (GRADE). All grades are

clustered by section (i.e., students who were taught by the same instructor at the same time) so that we can use SECTION as a variable in our analysis. We also received the major for each participant at the time of graduation. Because students may have changed their major, this may not have been their major at the time of completing the course. However, capturing major at graduation allows us to identify students who graduated with a license to teach ele- mentary school and compare them with students who graduated with other majors. The data set included 195860 grades from students in 230 different majors (See S1 for full data set). Because the data was archival and completely anonymous, obtaining con- sent from participants was not possible or necessary. The research team is not aware of the identity of participants. This procedure was approved by Brigham Young University's IRB (IRB2023-201). Data preparation These data were prepared for analysis. First, GRADEs were converted from letter grades (e.g., A) to numerical values on a 4.0-scale, as depicted in Table 1. SECTION was used in our analy- sis without modification. Table 1. Conversion from letter grade to values. Letter Values A 4 A- 3.666 B + 3.333 B 3 B- 2.666 C + 2.33 C 2 C- 1.666 D + 1.333 D 1 D- .666 E/W/IE/V 0 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320137.t001