Education Commons^™

The number of high school students who have taken and passed Advanced Placement (AP) exams has more than doubled since 2000. In this article, we examined whether this increased participation in the AP program has impacted twelfth-grade students' scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in mathematics, reading, and U.S. history for all students and for five major ethnic/racial groups: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American students. We found that the drastic increase in AP tests taken has coincided with improved NAEP scores in mathematics, but not in reading or U.S. history. We explored possible explanations …

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a widely used statistical method in which researchers attempt to ascertain the number and nature of latent factors that explain their observed variables. When conducting an EFA, researchers must choose the number of factors to retain—a critical decision that has drastic effects if made incorrectly. In this article, we examine a newly proposed method of choosing the number of factors to retain. In the new method, confidence intervals are created around each eigenvalue and factors are retained if the entire eigenvalue is greater than 1.0. Results show that this new method outperforms the traditional Guttman …

Multiple studies have shown the strong predictive power of high school grade point average (HSGPA) in forecasting future academic performance outcomes. However, the methods for calculating HSGPAs vary among schools, with some employing weighted methods in their calculations and others using unweighted scales. Due to these inconsistencies, it is often difficult to compare HSGPAs across high schools. This study involved the coding of 551 high school transcripts of pre-med college students in Texas. Unweighted HSGPAs were then calculated for each of these students on a standard 4.0 scale. Three multiple regression models were then created for the students with complete …