AP STEM Access Impact Evaluation

Rural Mississippi schools often face challenges in providing equitable access to Advanced Placement (AP) courses, particularly in STEM fields. This lack of access limits opportunities for high-achieving students to pursue rigorous STEM coursework and related careers. The AP STEM program aims to improve access to AP STEM courses for high-achieving students in rural Mississippi. Students in the program experience AP STEM material through a blended learning program wherein on-campus teachers facilitate face-to-face learning, AP-certified teachers and university-based tutors provide online resources (e.g., tutoring, exercises), and students attend intermittent face-to-face meetings, social events, and workshops. STEM-major students from leading universities provide live tutoring and mentorship online and STEM experts participate in face-to-face events as well as online mentorship. In this report, we describe findings from one impact study, a cluster-level QED with schools serving as the unit of assignment and students as the unit of measurement, evaluating the impact of the AP STEM program on AP pass rates at high schools across rural Mississippi. The study sample consisted of 1,532 students in attendance at 25 treatment schools and 44 comparison schools. The final matched sample consists of 728 students: 364 from comparison schools, and 364 from treatment schools. For this study, the comparison condition was no intervention or business-as-usual conditions. The sample was restricted at the school level based on the percentage of minority students, academic performance -- measured as average ACT composite at the school level, the number of students enrolled in AP courses, and the overall enrollment at the school level. Overall, we see that, although the program did increase access to AP courses, it did not result in significantly higher pass rates for both AP Physics and AP Computer Science among students exposed to the treatment condition. This suggests that while the intervention may be a mechanism for increasing access, additional or different interventions may be needed to produce significantly improved academic outcomes in AP STEM courses. The study also found that students who scored higher on the ACT were more likely to pass AP exams, regardless of treatment status. As is consistent with prior research this suggests that prior achievement is a strong predictor of success in AP STEM courses. [This report was published by the Center for Research Evaluation, University of Mississippi.]