Article pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Comparison of High School Dual-Enrollment and Traditional FirstTerm General/Organic/Biochemistry College Chemistry Class Outcomes Daniel R. Zuidema*,† and Kevin J. Eames‡ †
Department of Chemistry, Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia 30750, United States Office of Institutional Effectiveness, Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia 30750, United States
‡
ABSTRACT: Student performance in a high school dual-enrollment chemistry course was compared with student performance in the corresponding traditional college course. The two courses were taught by the same instructor and evaluated using the same American Chemical Society (ACS) standardized examination. Interestingly, the high school dual-enrollment students have outperformed the traditional college students on the college-level exam in each of the years that the dual-enrollment program has been in existence. Dual-enrolled students also consistently did better on the ACS college-level exam than they did on the ACS high school exam. KEYWORDS: High School/Introductory Chemistry, First-Year Undergraduate/General, Chemical Education Research, Testing/Assessment FEATURE: Chemical Education Research
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INTRODUCTION Dual-enrollment courses are college-level courses that high school students take in order to simultaneously earn high school and college credit. Dual-enrollment courses are also commonly called dual-credit or concurrent-enrollment courses, and enable students to earn college credit that can also be counted toward earning a high school diploma. The concept of dual-enrollment courses has been around for over 100 years.1 In recent years, dual-enrollment courses have become increasingly popular,2−4 presumably due to rising tuition costs and increased percentages of students going to college.5,6 Several benefits are associated with taking dual-enrollment courses, the most prominent of which is that students get the opportunity and challenge of completing college-level coursework while also earning high school credit. Students that participate in dual-enrollment programs have been shown to be more likely to graduate from high school, enroll in college, and progress toward college completion.7,8 Two recent reports have shown an association between taking dual-enrollment classes and positive postsecondary outcomes, including increased credit earned during the first semester of college with a higher collegiate GPA, and that this was a matter of causation rather than merely correlation.9,10 However, dual-enrollment courses have not come without their share of criticism from the academic community.11−14 There is concern that dual-enrollment classes will be “dumbed down” in order to make them accessible to high school students. Many have reservations about whether dual-enrollment courses will be taught by instructors who lack the proper qualifications. A 2011 report indicated that in 61% of the public high schools that offered © 2014 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
dual-enrollment courses, the courses were taught by high school faculty rather than college professors.15 Government sponsored dual-enrollment programs are on the rise, and have recently been reported for many states, including Tennessee,16 the state in which the high school described in this study is located. Several states across the nation are shifting to performance-based funding models that specifically address dual-enrollment initiatives.16−18 The funding formulas in many of these states provide incentives for school districts and colleges to forge relationships that afford students dualenrollment opportunities. To ensure that such relationships are meeting with success, mechanisms that offer a simple and straightforward measure of quality control will be important. Standardized testing has long been used for this purpose in education. For the study described herein, the authors formulated the following research question: Can high school dual-enrollment students achieve a similar level of mastery of the concepts of introductory chemistry in comparison with traditional college students taking a first-term General/Organic/Biochemistry (GOB) course? Our aim was to answer this question using American Chemical Society (ACS) standardized exam scores as a metric of students’ concept mastery. Given the increasing interest in dual-enrollment programs across the country, and given the widespread interest in bolstering science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, we believe the results of our study will be of interest to the chemical education community. Published: October 3, 2014 2058
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed500516x | J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91, 2058−2063
Journal of Chemical Education
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Article
BACKGROUND A literature search revealed that while dual-enrollment courses have been the subject of significant public interest recently, educational literature on dual-enrollment science education is quite sparse. We were surprised to see only one other article on the subject of dual-enrollment chemistry courses in this journal. White et al. recently reported a case study that compared the performance of traditional college chemistry students with students in dual-enrollment courses that were team-taught.19 In their model, the high school dual-enrollment courses were taught by high school teachers working in collaboration with a supervising university professor. The high school teachers served as adjunct professors for the cooperating university, a practice that some other institutions offering dual-enrollment options have adopted.20−22 This study revealed that in comparison with their traditional student counterparts, the dual-enrolled students were more likely to complete the course for credit and performed at similar or higher levels. White’s study seems to show early promise regarding high school students’ ability to demonstrate competence in collegiate chemistry courses. As far as we know, ours is the only other report on dual-enrollment chemistry courses, and the first report aimed at comparing dual-enrollment students’ performance on the ACS high school exam with their performance on the ACS college-level exam. This also represents the first study using standardized test scores to compare the performance of dual-enrolled students with traditional college students taking the same instructor for the same first-term GOB chemistry course that was not team-taught. Our results are reported herein.
of high school chemistry, and we also know from experience that many college science departments are hesitant to count dual-enrollment credit toward major program requirements. Offering Introductory Chemistry I would benefit prospective nonscience majors in that they could earn a transferrable college science credit. Students planning to major in the sciences were advised that the Introductory Chemistry I course would likely not exempt them from any of their collegiate science requirements, but were nonetheless encouraged to register for the college credit for a variety of reasons. A dualenrollment credit in science is often awarded as elective credit to a science major. Besides for the obvious advantage of possibly being able to graduate early, arriving to campus with a number of dual-enrollment and/or AP credits may earn a student other privileges such as being given a higher priority in registering for the next semester’s classes. And, of course, students frequently change their minds about their desired majors. To register for college credit, high school students had to have junior or senior standing, a minimum GPA of 3.00, and be at least 16 years old. Tuition was $400.00 for four semester hours of credit. Students were not required to take the course for dual-enrollment credit, but all students in the course were held to the same standards and requirements. To ensure students would be well-suited for the challenge of a dualenrollment course, a screening process was used at the high school. Students were required to have the approval of the high school science department head prior to signing up for the course. Generally, students who had a B average or higher in previous science courses were allowed to enroll. This prevented the possibility of a student entering the course without having the minimum requirements necessary for receiving college credit. One of the chief limitations we faced in setting up our dualenrollment course was ensuring similar educational experiences for both groups. There are fewer contact hours in a high school semester-long course as compared with a college semester-long course. To ensure that the high school students had sufficient contact hours, Introductory Chemistry I was taught as a yearlong course at the high school. The traditional college course met for one semester on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for 50 min, with a 3 h lab period on Tuesdays. The high school dual-enrollment course met for two semesters on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays for 51 min with an 85 min block period on Wednesdays. As a result of the shorter high school block period compared with the college lab period, high school students conducted a series of equivalent (but not identical) laboratory experiments. This study did not take into account the effect that performing different laboratory experiments may have had on students’ final exam scores. Also, the textbook used in the traditional course is an Allied Health chemistry textbook, since the class serves as the first course in the two-semester Allied Health sequence. We use the 4th edition of H. Stephen Stoker’s General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry in the traditional course. However, we were hesitant to have the high school purchase a new set of textbooks for the dual-enrollment course, especially in light of the fact that over half of the chapters in the new book would not be covered. Instead, the high school course continued to use Glencoe’s 2002 edition of the high school text Chemistry: Matter and Change. This study did not take into account the effect that using different textbooks may have had on students’ final exam scores. We were pleased to see that using a high
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OUR DUAL-ENROLLMENT MODEL In our dual-enrollment model, the same faculty member taught both the traditional college course and the dual-enrollment course. The faculty member serves both as a full-time tenured professor at Covenant College and as a part-time teacher at Chattanooga Christian School. Covenant College is a private four-year liberal arts college, and Chattanooga Christian School is a K−12 private school located 8 mi away from the college. A working relationship between the two schools is natural as the philosophy, mission, and vision of the two schools are very similar. What is more, approximately 10% of the students that graduate from Chattanooga Christian School attend Covenant College. Beginning in the fall of 2010, Introductory Chemistry I was offered as a dual-enrollment course at Chattanooga Christian School. At Covenant College, Introductory Chemistry I serves as the first course in our two-semester Allied Health General/Organic/Biochemistry (GOB) sequence. It also serves as one of the courses students can take to meet their laboratory science core requirement; high school chemistry is not a prerequisite. In any given year, approximately one-third of the students enrolled in the traditional course are taking it to satisfy the core requirement; the rest are usually students interested in completing the GOB sequence in order to pursue careers in nursing. Since most colleges require high school chemistry as a prerequisite for general chemistry, we decided that our dualenrollment course should be Introductory Chemistry I (our first-term GOB course for pre-nursing and nonscience majors), rather than General Chemistry I (our science majors’ course taken by aspiring chemists, engineers, physicians, etc.). The incoming high school juniors would lack the prerequisite year 2059
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed500516x | J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91, 2058−2063
Journal of Chemical Education
Article
professor, used the same textbook, and featured similar methods of instruction (the same lecture notes used, same end-of-chapter problems assigned, same quizzes given, etc.). The same was true for the dual-enrollment course. For each of the years represented in Table 1, the General Chemistry Subtest of the ACS GOB exam constituted a substantive portion of the final exam for both the traditional and the dualenrollment courses. In the high school, the final exam counted for 20% of the final grade. In the traditional course, the exact weight of the final exam fluctuated from year to year, ranging from 21% to 25% of the final grade. (This report represents a retrospective study of students’ past exam scores rather than an experiment that was planned beginning in 2006; otherwise, the weights would have been adjusted to be the same to allow for optimal comparison.) In any event, we believe that the final exam counted for a similar enough percentage of students’ overall final grade that the two groups had similar levels of motivation to prepare for the exam and take the assessment seriously. An independent samples t test assuming unequal variances was conducted to determine whether the collective mean score earned by students in the dual-enrollment course (over years 2011−2014) was significantly different from the collective mean score earned by students in the traditional Introductory Chemistry I course (over years 2006−2012). The difference was significant between dual-enrollment students (M = 82.7, SD = 15.34) and traditional students (M = 70.4, SD = 23; t = 3.023, p = 0.004, two tailed). Cohen’s d is 0.64, which is considered a moderate effect size. Eta squared equals 0.143, a large effect size that suggests that the two classes account for 14.3% of the variance in ACS GOB exam scores. Moreover, the difference between the dual-enrollment students’ raw ACS GOB exam scores and the national norm reported by the ACS was also statistically significant.24 This indicated to us that the mean for our dual-enrollment students was not only higher than the mean for our own group of traditional students, but also higher than the mean for the group of traditional college students used for determining the ACS norms. As an additional measure of assessment, our high school students also take the 2005 ACS High School (HS) exam at the conclusion of their course. Even though the ACS Examinations Institute offers standardized exams for advanced high school courses, we opted to use the traditional high school exam.25 We found it interesting that the average percentile scores on the ACS college GOB exam have been consistently higher than classes’ average percentile scores on the ACS HS exam. These results are shown in Table 2.
school text did not seem to hinder our dual-enrollment students’ performance on the ACS college-level exam. The authors believe that in most situations, it would be optimal for dual-enrollment students to use the same textbook as traditional students, especially in arrangements where high school dual-enrollment classes are taught by instructors who do not teach traditional college courses. It is worth noting that a few states fund textbooks for dual-enrollment classes.23 In situations where dual-enrollment courses are offered on high school campuses, school districts may wish to explore the possibility of whether using a rigorous high school level text already in use in the school system is a viable option for a firstterm GOB or nonmajors’ college chemistry course that does not have high school chemistry as a prerequisite. In our situation, both courses feature an introduction to the concepts of measurement, classification schemes of matter, atomic structure, nuclear chemistry, electronic structure and periodicity, bonding/nomenclature of ionic and covalent compounds, molecular geometry, chemical equations, the mole concept, stoichiometry, intermolecular forces in solids and liquids, the gas laws, solutions, rates and equilibrium, acid− base chemistry, redox, and structure/nomenclature of saturated hydrocarbons. Due to time constraints and the broad nature of the survey course, some topics receive less coverage than others; all topics are not studied at the same level of detail. When our pilot dual-enrollment program was put in place, the instructor was transparent with the administrations of both the college and the high school about the differences in textbooks and the laboratory experiments. Since the same instructor was teaching each course, and since the instructor was both an experienced college professor and high school teacher, all agreed to leave to the discretion of the instructor the specific ways in which the courses would be made to be equivalent. Using a standardized examination for both groups would provide a means of holding the instructor accountable for ensuring that material was not “dumbed down” and that standards for the high school students were not lower than those for students taking the traditional course.
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ASSESSMENT AND RESULTS To assess student learning, the General Chemistry Subtest of the 1991 ACS General/Organic/Biochemistry (GOB) exam was given at the conclusion of each course. The results are summarized in Table 1. For each of the four course cycles shown in Table 1, the traditional course was taught by the same Table 1. Comparison of Dual-Enrollment and Traditional Student Performance on the ACS College GOB Exam Year 2006 2008 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Traditional GOB percentile, mean ± SD 66 68 75 -b 72 -b -c
± 23 (N = 9) ± 30 (N = 8) ± 15 (N = 10) ± 26 (N = 12)
Dual-enrolled GOB percentile, mean ± SD
Table 2. Comparison of High School Students’ ACS GOB and HS Exam Scores
a
-a -a 82 89 83 77
Year ± ± ± ±
12 10 16 20
(N (N (N (N
= = = =
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
21) 15) 29) 17)
a
Dual-enrollment data do not appear until 2011 because the high school dual-enrollment program was not established until the 2010− 2011 school year. bIntroductory Chemistry I is offered in the fall semester of even years at Covenant College. cThe fall 2014 semester was not yet complete at the time of publication.
GOB percentile, mean ± SD b
-b 82 89 83 77
± ± ± ±
12 10 16 20
(N (N (N (N
= = = =
21) 15) 28) 17)
HS percentile, mean ± SD 55 71 69 72 66 61
± ± ± ± ± ±
16 19 21 14 17 21
(N (N (N (N (N (N
= = = = = =
16) 24) 21) 15) 28) 17)
t-statistica
p-value
2.458 3.646 4.015 2.162
0.018 0.001
