Comparing Academic Performance of Elementary Education Majors in General Education Science Courses

It is important for elementary teachers to understand the content they are responsible for teaching their students, known as content knowledge. In the content area of science, elementary teacher preparation programs often expect preservice teachers to develop content knowledge in college science courses completed prior to entering the program. These college science courses are often general education courses, not specifically designed for preservice elementary teachers. General education courses may not be adequately serving preservice elementary teachers. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of general education science courses on preservice elementary teachers, as compared to other students at the same institution. We collected student grades in six different general education courses across ten years of instruction, resulting in a data set with 195860 grades. These data were analyzed using linear mixed modeling to predict course grades in each of the individual courses. Overall, these findings indicate that elementary education majors in general education courses are receiving grades similar to students in most other majors. Notably, elementary education majors received grades comparable to STEM majors in Biology, while scoring worse than STEM majors in Physical Science. These findings assuage some concerns about the impact of general education courses on elementary education majors and suggest that elementary education programs seeking to provide a specialized science course may want to prioritize a course in physical science.