DOI: 10.3886/icpsr37643
title: Advanced Placement Science Impact Study, United States, 2013-2016
title: AP Science Impact Study
title: Archival Version

description: The AP Science Impact Study, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, seeks to understand the impact of Advanced Placement Biology and Chemistry classes on the high school students who take them. It examines the effects of the updated inquiry-based curriculum on students' confidence in scientific inquiry skills and their post-high school plans, including college type, selectivity, and major. This study has policy implications for science curriculum and the next generation STEM workforce. For more information, see https://evans.uw.edu/ap-science-impact-study
description: The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of Advanced Placement Biology and Chemistry classes on the high school students who take them.
description: With participation from 23 schools and over 1,800 students from across the United States, researchers randomly offered students enrollment into newly-launched AP Biology or Chemistry courses in their schools. To directly evaluate whether AP endows students with higher levels of skill than other science courses, they designed and validated an instrument to measure students' scientific inquiry abilities (e.g., the ability to analyze data and make scientific arguments). They also collected administrative data and surveyed students to assess AP impacts on their interest in pursuing a STEM degree in college, confidence in completing a college science course, high school grades, and stress levels.
description: This dataset includes various demographic variables, such as gender and race, in addition to variables about the content and structure of respondents' AP STEM classes. It also includes information on respondents' high school credtis and GPA variables.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: DS1: Dataset
description: on-site questionnaire
description: High school students
description: Researchers recruited 23 schools from across the United States and offered monetary compensation to pay for equipment and teacher training and as an incentive to secure participation.7 Eligible schools included ones that had not offered AP Biology or AP Chemistry in recent years; were willing to add such a course and comply with study protocol; and had more eligible students than could be served in one class so as to supply a sufficiently-sized control group. Each participating school identified students that the school deemed eligible to take the new AP Biology or Chemistry course in the spring of the prior year. Researchers treated all eligible students who assented to participate in the study and who obtained consent from their parent or guardian as study participants.