475 – Statistical Analysis of Educational Data: Challenges and Opportunities
The Impact of Career Academies on STEM Coursetaking: Moving to the Next Level
Rheta E. Lanehart
University of South Florida
Patricia RodrÃguez de Gil
University of South Florida
Maressa Dixon
University of South Florida
Jeffrey D. Kromrey
University of South Florida
Gladis Kersaint
University of South Florida
Propensity score (PS) methods provide viable strategies for reducing selection bias in nonexperimental (observational) studies. An NSF funded project previously used propensity score analysis to examine the impact of special educational programs on advanced mathematics course enrollment (Rodriguez de Gil et al., 2012). Results indicated that students who enrolled in career academies were almost twice as likely to enroll in a Calculus course. Encouraged by the findings from the previous study, we are currently using PS and survival analyses to investigate rigorous high school STEM/ICT coursetaking for students in a southern state who identified an interest in STEM or ICT careers as part of their 8th grade electronic Personal Education Planners (ePEPs) and the persistence of STEM coursetaking through high school. Comparison of rigorous STEM coursetaking trends and persistence with national data (High School Longitudinal Study: HSLS09) will be made. This study reports on correlates of 8th and 9th grade coursetaking and procedures used to identify the initial STEM cohort from the HSLS09 national dataset.