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 6 / 15 PLOS ONE Elementary Education Majors in General Education Science Courses Students’ majors were prepared for analysis by categorizing them into MAJOR TYPEs. These categories were created to cluster majors that include related coursework, ways of thinking, and professional pathways. Elementary Education (ELED) was included as its own MAJOR TYPE due to our interest in those students, and all majors other than ELED were clustered into broad fields, giving the following MAJOR TYPEs: 1. Arts and communications: Majors that focus on expressing human experience and ideas through media such as music, painting, video, and writing. 2. Business: Majors that focus on how organizations operate, make decisions, and manage resources. 3. Humanities: Majors in the humanities explore human society, culture, and thought, such as art history, languages, literature, and philosophy. 4. Social sciences: These majors focus on how people live together in groups and why they think or behave like they do. 5. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM): These majors are about understanding and harnessing the natural and designed world. 6. Elementary Education (ELED): This category included early childhood education and elementary education majors. While there are important differences in the programs, both prepare students for teaching in elementary schools, and both have the same requirements for science content. Secondary education majors were included with the majors of their disciplines (e.g., a

student majoring in Physics Teaching was considered a STEM major) since the bulk of the coursework for secondary education programs are focused on disciplinary content and taught by disciplinary experts. Students (n = 2661, 1.4% of the total sample) who majored in “general studies” were excluded from these categories because the needed information was unspeci- fied (i.e., general education majors pursue individualized programs of study). The number of students in each of these MAJOR TYPEs is captured in Table 2. Analysis All analyses were conducted using IBM® SPSS Statistics (version 29.0.1.0). We chose to use linear mixed modeling to predict course grades, so we could use SECTION as a random effect to account for the nested nature of the data. By allowing for a random intercept for each section, we were able to compare elementary education majors to their peers in their same section. This eliminates confounding variables (e.g., course structure, pedagogical choices) that would impact student performance. We used a separate model for each general education course, with final course grade (GRADE) in that course as our outcome and major (MAJOR Table 2. Number of students in each MAJOR TYPE. MAJOR TYPE Number of Students Percent Arts and Communications 21,752 11.3 Business 28,132 14.6 Humanities 17,668 9.1 Social Sciences 53,258 23.7 STEM 72,389 37.5 ELED 7,461 3.9 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320137.t002