New Advanced Placement course designed to broaden access promotes participation and demographic diversity in computer science education.

ABSTRACT: Advanced Placement (AP) provides college-level courses to over 1 million US secondary students annually. Black, Hispanic, and female students have historically been underrepresented in AP Computer Science (CS). A new, broadly focused course-AP CS Principles-launched nationally in 2016-17 with the goal of increasing student participation and diversity. We examine its effects on AP CS participation. Combining publicly available sources, we assemble a panel dataset of annual AP exam-taking and course offerings from 2006-07 to 2020-21 at Massachusetts high schools. Using synthetic difference-in-differences, we estimate that offering the new course led to 16 additional yearly AP Computer Science exams per school, more than tripling baseline exam counts for the average adopting school. Exam coun

SUBMITTER: Ganelin D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12012468 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature