A Preliminary Academic Performance Assessment Of Missouri University Of Science and Technology Students With Project Lead The Way Course Experience

There have been a number of studies examining the impact of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education programs in providing college preparation.These studies have found benefits for pre-college students in STEM related career pursuits, academic performance, pre-college course attendance, retention, student engagement, among many others.In a previous study, our research group compared the academic performance of Missouri S&T students with and without Project Lead The Way (PLTW) course experience based on academic records obtained for students pursuing engineering and computer science degree programs in the Fall Semester 2015 and the Spring Semester 2016.In this paper, we extend the study to assess academic performance results for Missouri S&T students with and without PLTW course experience for the Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, and Fall 2016 semesters for students pursuing 16 engineering and computer science degree programs.We examined the academic records of 3,358, 5,704, 4,817, and 5,063 students who indicated that they have not taken any PLTW courses in their K-12 programs (non-PLTW students) and 309, 628, 517, and 562 students who indicated that they took one or more PLTW courses in their K-12 programs (PLTW students) from the Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, and Fall 2016 semesters, respectively.Results for engineering and computer science majors showed an overall average grade point average improvement of 5.2%, 5.7%, 2.4%, and 4.1%, respectively, from the Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, and Fall 2016 semesters for the PLTW student group over the non-PLTW group.Results from this study also show consistent academic performance improvement for students in their freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years of study, with higher improvements in the freshman and sophomore years, for the 16 engineering and computer science degree programs offered at Missouri S&T.This study of academic performance assessment over the spring and fall semesters for the 2015 and 2016 academic years highlights the potential that students with PLTW course experience have attained tangible improvement in academic performance at Missouri S&T over students with no PLTW course experience.