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 8 / 15 PLOS ONE Elementary Education Majors in General Education Science Courses are bringing with them to teaching. Thus, we do not use ACT and high school GPA as covari- ates in our study. Limitations To capture such a large set of data, it was necessary that we accept some limitations. The primary limitation is that we know that grades are not necessarily an indicator of learning [75,76]. Grades capture a wide span of indicators, often including attendance, participation, and timeliness [77]. However, it is likely impossible to get more detailed data on student learning for such a large sample. Therefore, we confine our claims to the grades students received in these courses, carefully avoiding making claims about student learning. Another important limitation is that we have no data about the specific sections of the courses or specific students. For example, there are differences in how sections were taught over the years. Furthermore, there may also be characteristics of individual students that influ- enced their experience in these courses (e.g., perception of relevance). With a large, retrospec- tive data set we were unable to gather such information. While we will speculate on potential causes, we do not have evidence of these causes. Results We begin with general descriptive statistics to provide an overview of the data set. We then present the results of the statistical models. Sample characteristics

As we report the characteristics of participants in this sample, we should note that we do not have information about how many individuals are represented by this data set. Our data is associated with a grade in one of the six courses: an individual may have taken a course multi- ple times and individuals likely completed more than one of the six courses. Of the six courses in this sample, the largest portion of grades came from Biology, His- tory, and Statistics, with each of these accounting to approximately a quarter of the grades (see Table 3). The remaining quarter of grades were drawn from the remaining three courses. Importantly, this difference is a result of differences in actual enrollment rather than sampling since all grades from these courses were collected. Mean grades for each course are presented in Table 3. There is a statistically significant difference among the mean grades in these courses, F(5, 195859) = 1142, p < .001, h2 = .028. The lowest mean grades were in History and Statistics, whereas the highest mean grades were in Biology, Humanities, and Physical Science. Table 3. Students and GRADES in each course. BIO PHYS STAT HUM HDEV HIST Number of Grades Number 40,113 34,439 46,705 12,276 14,732 47,595 Percentage 20.5% 17.6% 23.8% 6.3% 7.5% 24.3% GRADE Mean 3.16 3.17 2.80 3.16 3.03 2.77 Median 3.33 3.66 3.33 3.66 3.33 3.00 SD 1.01 0.98 1.24 1.02 1.02 1.04 Note: Abbreviations in the table are as follows: Biology (BIO), Physical Science (PHYS), Statistics (STAT), Humanities (HUM), Human Development (HDEV), and

History (HIST). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320137.t003