AP COMPUTER SCIENCE PRINCIPLES

The Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (APCSP) course was introduced in 2016 to address long-standing gender and racial/ethnic disparities in the United States among students taking Advanced Placement Computer Science (APCS) in high school, as well as among those who pursue computing majors in college. With a unique focus on creative problem-solving and real-world applications, APCSP introduces students to the foundational concepts of computer science and challenges them to explore how computing and technology can impact the broader world.

A collaboration between the Momentum team and the University of Oregon, this project uses data collected by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey to examine the characteristics and aspirations of college students who had taken APCSA (the “traditional” course) or APCSP (the new course) while in high school. While our first study revealed that there is greater racial/ethnic and gender diversity among students taking APCSP compared to APCSA, our second explored the extent to which APCS course-taking predicts intent to major in a computing field or aspire to a computing career, and whether this differs by gender and race/ethnicity. Results indicated that taking APCSA positively predicted students’ major or career aspirations in computing and technology, but that taking APCSP on its own did not predict long-term computing interest (although positive associations were identified for women).

The data for this study come from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s (CIRP) Freshman Survey, which is distributed by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI). The survey is distributed to students prior to beginning their first year of college and asks about multiple domains of student identity and pre-college experiences. In 2017, The Freshman Survey (TFS) had more than 120,000 respondents from 168 colleges and universities. Among the respondents, 8,844 students had taken an APCS course in high school, including 6,098 students who had taken only APCSA, 1,851 students who took APCSP, and 896 students who had taken both courses. Our research has used descriptive analyses to explore the demographic and academic characteristics of students who took APCS courses and have used logistic regression to understand the extent to which different patterns of APCS course-taking uniquely predict students’ intent to major in computing or aspire to work in a tech career when controlling for demographic characteristics, pre-college experiences, and proxies of academic achievement.

Publications

Please click on the column headers to sort by alphabetical/numerical order.

If you are viewing on a mobile device, we recommend viewing on landscape mode.