The Role of Student Beliefs in Dual-Enrollment Courses.

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Access to dual-enrollment courses, which allow high school students to earn college credit, is stratified by race/ethnicity, class, and geography. States and colleges have begun using of readiness, including measures of student preparedness, in lieu of strict reliance on test scores in an attempt to expand and equalize access. This practice was accelerated by COVID-19 due to disruptions in standardized testing. However, limited research has examined how beliefs shape students' experiences and outcomes in dual-enrollment courses. We study a large dual-enrollment program created by a university in the Southwest to examine these patterns. We find that mathematics self-efficacy and educational expectations predict performance in dual-enrollment courses, even when controlling for students' academic preparedness, while factors such as high school belonging, college belonging, and self-efficacy in other academic domains are unrelated to academic performance. However, we find that students of color and first-generation students have lower self-efficacy and educational expectations before enrolling in dual-enrollment courses, in addition to having lower levels of academic preparation. These findings suggest that using non-cognitive measures to determine student eligibility for dual-enrollment courses could exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, inequitable patterns of participation. Students from historically marginalized populations may benefit from social-psychological as well as academic supports in order to receive maximum benefits from early postsecondary opportunities such as dual-enrollment. Our findings have implications for how states and dual-enrollment programs determine eligibility for dual-enrollment as well as how dual-enrollment programs should be designed and delivered in order to promote equity in college preparedness.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11162-023-09740-z.