Encouraging students to pursue higher-level science, technology, engineering, and math courses requires deliberate planning, especially for those students historically underrepresented in those fields.
Schools can’t put more advanced courses on the schedule without teachers who feel confident taking on the material. And even then, simply offering such classes doesn’t necessarily mean students will enroll in them—or succeed.
But one Advanced Placement STEM course has overcome many of these barriers, a new study finds.
When schools offered the relatively new AP Computer Science Principles course, more students took any AP computer science exam at the end of the year—and the number of female, Black, and Hispanic exam-takers more than quadrupled, concludes the research from Stanford University.
“What we’re seeing here strikes me as a really notable success in education policy,” said Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and an author of the study. “It suggests the promise of really intentional course design that instantiates high expectations and gets academically rigorous content in front of our kids.”
The College Board, the organization that runs the AP program, launched AP Computer Science Principles, or AP CSP, during the 2016-17 year, aiming to bring more Black, Latino, and female students into the field. It serves as an introduction to the discipline, exploring the core concepts that underlie computer science and its real-world applications—in contrast to the longer-standing AP Computer Science A course, which focuses more squarely on hands-on programming.
AP CSP has been one of the fastest-growing AP options over the past few years. Students who take it are more likely to declare STEM majors in college compared to their peers who didn’t have AP CSP available to them, the College Board has reported.
Now, the Stanford study shows that, at least in Massachusetts where the study was conducted, this rapid growth comes from more students who wouldn’t have otherwise taken computer science courses entering the discipline—not from kids who would have taken AP Computer Science A opting to take the CSP course instead.
It’s possible, the researchers said, that offering AP CSP could have introduced new inequities into schools. Girls, and Black and Latino students, might have switched into—or been routed into—the CSP course instead of Computer Science A. The former is more introductory and contains less technical content.
“There’s a long history of worry about exactly that—the in-school stratification that can happen when there are different pathways to academic rigor,” said Dee.
But that’s not what happened. The number of students taking AP Computer Science A remained mostly unchanged, while the number of kids taking the AP CSP test rose, the researchers found.
“If that continues, that’s hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of kids who are exposed to rigorous computer science in high school,” said Daniela Ganelin, a PhD student at Stanford and the lead author on the study.
How AP’s two computer science courses differ
The researchers compared two sets of schools in Massachusetts: 172 schools that offered at least one course in AP CSP, and 115 schools that only offered AP CSA. They examined the number of students who took any AP computer science exam—CSP or CSA—between the 2016-17 school year and the 2020-21 school year.
They found that in schools that offered AP CSP, schools reported on average an additional 16 computer science exams taken each year. These test-takers are a more diverse group than before, with more girls, Black students, and Hispanic students represented.
Still, the overall numbers of historically underrepresented students taking AP exams in the subject are small, said Dee. For example, in a typical AP CSA course in Massachusetts, data show one or two girls enrolled, compared to five girls in an AP CSP course.
“It’s a change that’s substantial, but often a very low base,” he said.
The researchers also found an unexpected bonus: Schools that offered AP CSP saw more AP exam participation overall—over and above the increase due to computer science exams alone.
Massachusetts—which the researchers chose because of the state’s department of education’s detailed data on AP participation—has higher AP participation in general than other states. The effect of offering AP CSP could vary in other places.
The study didn’t investigate why exam-taking increased, but Ganelin offered some hypotheses. The designers of the course were “very intentional” about making it accessible to all students, regardless of prior programming experience, she said. The College Board has also offered summer training programs for teachers to prepare them for the class—slightly more than half of educators teaching AP CSP don’t have a background in the subject.
“I think this is all very positive,” said Doug Havard, an assistant professor of quantitative methods in the Attallah College of Educational Studies at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., whose research compares the two AP computer science offerings. (He was not involved with the Stanford study.)
Still, he offered some caution in assuming that students in AP CSP are receiving the same access to, and preparation for, STEM education as their peers in AP CSA, because of some of the design choices the course’s creators made.
Students in the AP CSP course don’t learn a designated programming language—which differs from AP CSA, in which students work in Java, a commonly used programming language.
An AP CSP teacher at one school might use Scratch, a beginner language aimed at teaching kids and teens how to code, Havard said. Another teacher at a different school might teach students to work in Python, a general-purpose programming language that’s used by many large tech companies and government agencies.
Both groups of students might do well in the course, but they would leave it with different levels of preparation for college and the workforce, he said.
“The way that AP Computer Science Principles is written,” Havard said, “it could look very different in the same school setting with two different teachers.”
