By Jay Mathews, Washington Post
May 19, 2011
West Potomac High School in Fairfax County and Oakland Mills High School in Howard County are as close as schools come to being twins. Both are in affluent counties and serve ethnically and economically diverse populations. Forty-seven percent of West Potomac students and 52 percent of Oakland Mills students are black or Hispanic. Thirty-eight percent at West Potomac and 31 percent at Oakland Mills are from low-income families.
But when I indulge in my obsessive comparison of schools by their college-level course programs, significant differences emerge. Oakland Mills often bars students from taking Advanced Placement classes if they don’t have B’s in previous courses. West Potomac lets in everyone who signs up and pays the test fees. The AP test participation rate at West Potomac is three times what it is at Oakland Mills, but the passing rate on tests at the Fairfax school is lower: 61 percent, compared with 78 percent at Oakland Mills.
That wide gap in approaches to challenging courses is why I started rating high schools 13 years ago by how successful they were at giving students a taste of college trauma. In a national context, as college-level programs such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate have become the prime means of preparing students for higher education, giving more students those opportunities has become crucial and controversial. Only half of students who go to college get to take college-level courses in high school, which many educators think is fine and others think is wrong. That controversy is one reason my rankings have drawn such attention.
The national list is being published now for the first time by The Washington Post. We call it The High School Challenge.
The idea for the list came to me as I was completing a book about America’s best public high schools. I kept running into the same mindless policy: Schools refused to let average students take the college-level courses and tests, reserving them for the better students. Research and common sense suggested that C students would learn much and be readier for college if they also took AP, but few schools appreciated that.
To illuminate the issue, I began ranking schools in 1998 on participation in AP and IB tests. Later, I added the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of E ducation exam to what I named the Challenge Index. The national list started that year in Newsweek, the local list in The Post. This year’s national ranking moved to The Post after The Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek last summer.
The Challenge Index calculation is simple. I wanted everyone to be able to understand it and use it. Add up all the AP, IB or AICE tests taken in a given year. Divide by the number of graduating seniors. The target I set is also simple: Every school should reach a ratio of at least 1.000 — that is, as many college-level tests taken as diplomas issued. Any school that does will make my national list, unless its passing rate on those tests is unusually low or the school is unusually selective.
School leaders in Larchmont, N.Y., Winnetka, Ill., Beverly Hills, Calif., and elsewhere were puzzled and annoyed when I began this exercise. Because schools in those places allowed only their best students to take AP, they ranked lower on my list than some daring schools in less-wealthy communities that opened AP to all who wanted to work hard.
By coincidence, Washington area educators began a massive reform of their rules for placing students in college-level courses and tests. Influenced by the same pioneering teachers who had shown me the power of challenging more students, high schools in Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District created in this metropolitan region what continues to be the heaviest concentration of college-level courses in the country.
My list finds that only 1,910 U.S. public high schools, about 7 percent of the nationwide total, meet the target ratio. In the Washington area, 75 percent of public high schools do.
Some other regions do well, but not that well. Numerous school systems, wary of challenging students they believe are unready, hold the view that AP, IB and AICE are appropriate only for those with A or B averages. Some urban schools are discouraged by low test scores and therefore don’t encourage students to take AP.
But in some low-income communities, schools encourage as many students as possible to take AP, even if they rarely pass the exams, so they will get a sense of what college demands.
My method differs from how high schools are usually rated. Some lists use average SAT or ACT scores, state test scores or the percentage of graduates who go to four-year colleges. Those results are often so influenced by family income that you could get similar rankings by averaging the square footage of the students’ homes. Many principals and teachers have told me they prefer a measure such as mine that puts weight on efforts of school staffs to prepare students for college. They say that shows the quality of the school rather than the economic status of the parents and gives schools full of impoverished students a rare opportunity to shine.
The list draws attention in part because readers love rankings of any sort. It also is regularly denounced by educators who say it is wrong to rank schools based on just one number.
One of the most revealing arguments about this was between me and Patrick Welsh, an acclaimed English teacher at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School who frequently contributes to The Post. When we debated the issue in Outlook in 2005, Welsh said: “You’ve unwittingly created an out-of-control monster, a smoke and mirrors numbers game, the equivalent of ranking the teams in the NCAA basketball tournament on the basis of the number of players who got in the game, instead of the final score.”
I thought the metaphor worked better for me, since a school does not exist to beat other schools but to raise the achievement of students. Getting a lot of them into games is likely to sharpen their skills.
Welsh said adding students who read way below grade level into AP meant high achievers weren’t being challenged and low achievers were overwhelmed. I said he ought to visit Wakefield High in Arlington County, a five-minute drive from T.C. Williams. The two schools were demographically similar, serving large numbers of black or Hispanic students, many from poor families. Yet Wakefield teachers urged everyone to try AP and got award-winning results. The month after our debate, Wakefield had a Challenge Index rating of 2.030, compared with T.C. Williams’s 1.494. The percentage of AP tests passed by Wakefield students was higher: 51 percent to 39 percent. Thirty-five percent of the graduating Wakefield senior class had passed at least one AP exam, compared with 20 percent at T.C. Williams.
Mike Grill, the AP coordinator at Wakefield, told me then: “I don’t have patience for teachers who make excuses to explain why students can’t learn in their courses. The issue is not ‘why they can’t learn,’ but rather ‘why can’t you teach them?’ ”
Average students barred from AP usually don’t complain. They are used to being overlooked. But a few protest. Kerry Constabile at Mamaroneck High School in the New York City suburbs was upset when her request to take AP American History was denied because she had less than a B in social studies her sophomore year. She assigned the AP course to herself, getting the homework assignments from friends. She got a 3 on the 5-point AP exam. She was convinced that she would have done better had the school let her in the course.
Students in Howard have the same problem. If they don’t have at least a B in 10th-grade social science or a teacher’s recommendation, they can’t take AP U.S. history. Clarissa Evans, the county’s executive director for secondary curricular programs, said, “we have more work to do” in that area. Howard got a College Board award for improving AP access but still trails many other districts.
Frank Eastham, principal of Oakland Mills, said his teachers have been talking about ways to give more students exposure to AP, “but some think we are setting kids up for failure if we let them take a course for which they haven’t gotten the prerequisite class.”
At West Potomac High, AP Coordinator Drew Hamlin said: “We stress that success in AP courses is achievable for all students who are driven to succeed.”
The situation is worse in inner-city schools, where most students fail the AP exams. But those students often lack strong preliminary courses to get ready.
The inspiration for the list came a decade before I started compiling the AP participation data for schools nationwide. In 1987, I had the AP results from just one school — Garfield High in East Los Angeles. Eighty-five percent of the students were from low-income families, and AP courses had been rare. A few teachers changed that by upgrading lower-level courses so students would be ready for AP.
In 1987, 85 of the 129 Garfield students who took an AP calculus exam got a passing score of 3 or better. Amazingly, 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed an AP Calculus exam that year were from Garfield.
The famous math teacher Jaime Escalante had about half of them, but the other half were taught by Ben Jimenez. He was not a celebrity, just a competent, hard-working educator.
That statistic has haunted me since. I was glad to see the Garfield teachers recognized, but there was a darker side to the data. Why hadn’t the thousands of other schools in the country with underestimated Mexican Americans (or other kinds of students) done what the Garfield teachers had done? What was stopping them?
Take a look at the new national list and you will see which schools are asking themselves that question and trying to do something about it. I wish there were many more schools on the list than there are.
Showing posts with label Advanced Placement courses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Advanced Placement courses. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Advanced Placement courses move from nice add-on to norm on college resumes
By LIAM MIGDAIL-SMITH | The Patriot-News
January 3, 2011
Take the SATs? Check.
Count up activities and community service? Check.
Have three or four college courses already under your belt?
For students hoping to get accepted at higher-end colleges, taking a few Advanced Placement courses — accelerated high school classes that count for college credit depending on how students score on a standardized test — is no longer a nice add-on to college resumes. It’s the norm.
“It’s getting to the point when you don’t see AP courses on a student’s resume, you wonder why,” said Bill Brown, vice president of enrollment at Lebanon Valley College in Annville Township.
Nationally, the Advanced Placement program has grown exponentially since it was introduced in the 1950s.
The number of U.S. students taking AP exams jumped about 50 percent in the last five years, from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, according to the College Board, the agency that oversees AP programs and other standardized testing such as the SATs.
On average, students have access to eight or nine of the 34 AP courses offered by the College Board. They range from calculus to art history.
Several midstate schools are nationally recognized for being far ahead of the pack. Cumberland Valley High School leads with 27 course offerings. That’s more than double the 13 courses the school had in 2005.
Hershey High School offers 21 courses, and West Shore School District’s two high schools each offer 17. Camp Hill High School offers 10, and about half of its students are enrolled in AP courses.
About half of college-bound students take an AP course, said Trevor Packer of the College Board.
“It is very much the norm for students going to selective or highly selective institutions to have taken at least one college-level course,” Packer said.
John Chopka, vice president of enrollment at Messiah College in Upper Allen Township, said AP courses on a resume show a drive to succeed that can be hard to determine from college essays or other parts of an application.
“There’s just a little extra dose of motivation that comes with deciding to take an AP course,” he said.
But can there be too much?
Parents expressed concern at a November Cumberland Valley School Board meeting that the district encouraging AP courses even for freshmen could be stressful for students. The district was looking to cut an honors freshman social studies course so students would be more inclined to take the AP equivalent. There would be an advanced course beyond the college prep track, but it wouldn’t have an honors weight.
Administrators responded to parents’ worries at the meeting by saying that if students are motivated to take the honors course, why not take it a step further with AP?
“The demand of an AP class is similar to a 100-level college class,” said parent Nancy McKinley of Hampden Township. “Developmentally, ninth- and 10th-graders are in a very different place, and it can be very stressful for them.”
McKinley, whose daughter is taking the freshman AP social studies course, said she’s thrilled with the school’s AP program but wants to see other good options for those who aren’t ready to tackle the college-level work.
Kim Clements, a guidance counselor at Cumberland Valley, said most AP courses are offered in the junior and senior years. The honors courses the first two years are designed to prepare students to go into them.
There are students who can take only AP courses, but most of us are not that superhuman, Clements said. It’s important for students to balance their schedules to be rigorous while keeping in mind that college-level courses come with a college-level workload, she said.
“You also don’t want a student to be a basket case of nerves because they’ve overdone it,” Clements said.
The increase in AP programs has brought with it an increase in students overloading and having stress-related issues, she said.
Clements tells her students to home in on their passions. Students should take AP courses in which they’re interested and excel, she said. And when there’s a student doing well in less-difficult courses, she’ll often encourage him to challenge himself and make the jump to AP.
Students say they are happy about AP options but add the classes could be difficult.
“It’s good the school’s really pushing us to take them,” said Cumberland Valley junior Katie Kaplewicz, 16, of Hampden Township. “But sometimes kids take them because they feel they have to, and they don’t really belong in the class.”
Kaplewicz is taking AP English and psychology courses. Her classmate, junior Alison Hellman, said the classes are a few notches above the honors classes she’s taken.
“You definitely have to put more time into the courses,” said Hellman, 17, of Hampden Township.
AP courses carry weight over honors classes on applications because they’re standardized across the board, said Dan Tredinnick, a spokesman for the Derry Township School District. College admissions officers know what’s in an AP course because it’s set by the College Board, versus an honors course that varies from school to school.
“They know they’re looking at apples to apples when they’re comparing different students from different schools,” Tredinnick said.
College admissions officers agree. But they look at the rigor of a student’s schedule as a whole, they added, so it’s fine to have a mix of AP and honors classes.
“I’d rather see a student take a balanced curriculum with some AP courses,” said Brown of Lebanon Valley College.
January 3, 2011
Take the SATs? Check.
Count up activities and community service? Check.
Have three or four college courses already under your belt?
For students hoping to get accepted at higher-end colleges, taking a few Advanced Placement courses — accelerated high school classes that count for college credit depending on how students score on a standardized test — is no longer a nice add-on to college resumes. It’s the norm.
“It’s getting to the point when you don’t see AP courses on a student’s resume, you wonder why,” said Bill Brown, vice president of enrollment at Lebanon Valley College in Annville Township.
Nationally, the Advanced Placement program has grown exponentially since it was introduced in the 1950s.
The number of U.S. students taking AP exams jumped about 50 percent in the last five years, from 1.2 million to 1.8 million, according to the College Board, the agency that oversees AP programs and other standardized testing such as the SATs.
On average, students have access to eight or nine of the 34 AP courses offered by the College Board. They range from calculus to art history.
Several midstate schools are nationally recognized for being far ahead of the pack. Cumberland Valley High School leads with 27 course offerings. That’s more than double the 13 courses the school had in 2005.
Hershey High School offers 21 courses, and West Shore School District’s two high schools each offer 17. Camp Hill High School offers 10, and about half of its students are enrolled in AP courses.
About half of college-bound students take an AP course, said Trevor Packer of the College Board.
“It is very much the norm for students going to selective or highly selective institutions to have taken at least one college-level course,” Packer said.
John Chopka, vice president of enrollment at Messiah College in Upper Allen Township, said AP courses on a resume show a drive to succeed that can be hard to determine from college essays or other parts of an application.
“There’s just a little extra dose of motivation that comes with deciding to take an AP course,” he said.
But can there be too much?
Parents expressed concern at a November Cumberland Valley School Board meeting that the district encouraging AP courses even for freshmen could be stressful for students. The district was looking to cut an honors freshman social studies course so students would be more inclined to take the AP equivalent. There would be an advanced course beyond the college prep track, but it wouldn’t have an honors weight.
Administrators responded to parents’ worries at the meeting by saying that if students are motivated to take the honors course, why not take it a step further with AP?
“The demand of an AP class is similar to a 100-level college class,” said parent Nancy McKinley of Hampden Township. “Developmentally, ninth- and 10th-graders are in a very different place, and it can be very stressful for them.”
McKinley, whose daughter is taking the freshman AP social studies course, said she’s thrilled with the school’s AP program but wants to see other good options for those who aren’t ready to tackle the college-level work.
Kim Clements, a guidance counselor at Cumberland Valley, said most AP courses are offered in the junior and senior years. The honors courses the first two years are designed to prepare students to go into them.
There are students who can take only AP courses, but most of us are not that superhuman, Clements said. It’s important for students to balance their schedules to be rigorous while keeping in mind that college-level courses come with a college-level workload, she said.
“You also don’t want a student to be a basket case of nerves because they’ve overdone it,” Clements said.
The increase in AP programs has brought with it an increase in students overloading and having stress-related issues, she said.
Clements tells her students to home in on their passions. Students should take AP courses in which they’re interested and excel, she said. And when there’s a student doing well in less-difficult courses, she’ll often encourage him to challenge himself and make the jump to AP.
Students say they are happy about AP options but add the classes could be difficult.
“It’s good the school’s really pushing us to take them,” said Cumberland Valley junior Katie Kaplewicz, 16, of Hampden Township. “But sometimes kids take them because they feel they have to, and they don’t really belong in the class.”
Kaplewicz is taking AP English and psychology courses. Her classmate, junior Alison Hellman, said the classes are a few notches above the honors classes she’s taken.
“You definitely have to put more time into the courses,” said Hellman, 17, of Hampden Township.
AP courses carry weight over honors classes on applications because they’re standardized across the board, said Dan Tredinnick, a spokesman for the Derry Township School District. College admissions officers know what’s in an AP course because it’s set by the College Board, versus an honors course that varies from school to school.
“They know they’re looking at apples to apples when they’re comparing different students from different schools,” Tredinnick said.
College admissions officers agree. But they look at the rigor of a student’s schedule as a whole, they added, so it’s fine to have a mix of AP and honors classes.
“I’d rather see a student take a balanced curriculum with some AP courses,” said Brown of Lebanon Valley College.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Leave No Bubble Blank
Also check out another article previously posted to this blog titled, Rethinking Advanced Placement. Some important technical changes being made as we gear up for a national conversation on K-12 college readiness standards. Already occurring here in Texas, by the way.
-Patricia
By INYOUNG KANG | NY Times
Published: January 7, 2011
IF you don’t know the answer, guess.
Come May, the next sitting for Advanced Placement exams, the College Board is switching to right-only scoring: each correct answer counts; no deductions for wrong ones. By guessing, you have a 20 or 25 percent chance of getting it right, depending on the number of answer choices.
The new scoring mirrors other standardized tests, except the SAT. A wrong answer there comes with a 0.25-point deduction. The College Board, which owns both tests, is changing only A.P.
Psychometricians advised that right-only scoring would simplify year-to-year comparisons as new exams are phased in, according to Trevor Packer, vice president responsible for Advanced Placement.
-Patricia
By INYOUNG KANG | NY Times
Published: January 7, 2011
IF you don’t know the answer, guess.
Come May, the next sitting for Advanced Placement exams, the College Board is switching to right-only scoring: each correct answer counts; no deductions for wrong ones. By guessing, you have a 20 or 25 percent chance of getting it right, depending on the number of answer choices.
The new scoring mirrors other standardized tests, except the SAT. A wrong answer there comes with a 0.25-point deduction. The College Board, which owns both tests, is changing only A.P.
Psychometricians advised that right-only scoring would simplify year-to-year comparisons as new exams are phased in, according to Trevor Packer, vice president responsible for Advanced Placement.
Rethinking Advanced Placement
By CHRISTOPHER DREW | NY Times
Published: January 7, 2011
WHEN Joan Carlson started teaching high school biology more than 30 years ago, the Advanced Placement textbook was daunting enough, at 36 chapters and 870 pages. But as an explosion of research into cells and genes reshapes our sense of how life evolves, the flood of new material has been staggering. Mrs. Carlson’s A.P. class in Worcester, Mass., now confronts a book with 56 chapters and 1,400 pages, along with a profusion of animated videos and Web-based aids that supplement the text.
And what fuels the panic is that nearly every tongue-twisting term and microscopic fact is fair game for the year-end test that decides who will receive college credit for the course.
“Some of the students look at the book and say, ‘My gosh, it’s just like an encyclopedia,’ ” Mrs. Carlson says. And when new A.P. teachers encounter it, “they almost want to start sobbing.”
As A.P. has proliferated, spreading to more than 30 subjects with 1.8 million students taking 3.2 million tests, the program has won praise for giving students an early chance at more challenging work. But many of the courses, particularly in the sciences and history, have also been criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics. Students and educators alike say that biology, with 172,000 test-takers this year, is one of the worst offenders.
A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero-sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery.
All that, says the College Board, is about to change.
Next month, the board, the nonprofit organization that owns the A.P. exams as well as the SAT, will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history — with 387,000 test-takers the most popular A.P. subject. A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. In biology, a host of more creative, hands-on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists.
The changes, which are to take effect in the 2012-13 school year, are part of a sweeping redesign of the entire A.P. program. Instead of just providing teachers with a list of points that need to be covered for the exams, the College Board will create these detailed standards for each subject and create new exams to match.
Trevor Packer, the College Board’s vice president for Advanced Placement, notes that the changes mark a new direction for the board, which has focused on the tests more than the courses. The rollout of “the New A.P.,” as the board describes it, will actually start this year with a new curriculum taking effect in two smaller programs, German and French language. Major revisions to physics, chemistry, European history, world history and art history will follow, with the hope of being ready for exams in 2014 or 2015.
“We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” Mr. Packer says. A.P. teachers made clear that such a shift was impossible unless the breadth of material covered was pared down. Courses in English and math are manageable, Mr. Packer says, and will not be revised until later.
The new approach is important because critical thinking skills are considered essential for advanced college courses and jobs in today’s information-based economy. College administrators and veteran A.P. teachers familiar with the new biology curriculum believe the changes could have significant reverberations for how science is taught in introductory college classes and even elementary school classrooms, and might bring some of the excitement back to science learning.
And here is one indication of how pumped up the College Board is about the revitalization: If Mr. Packer were a high school junior next year, would he take the old A.P. biology or wait till his senior year for the new one?
“I would absolutely wait,” he says.
WHEN A.P. testing began in 1956, memorization was not yet a dirty word, and it was O.K. if history classes ran out of time just after they finished World War II.
The College Board created the first exams at the behest of elite preparatory schools, which wanted to convince colleges that their best students could dart right into advanced work. The board based the exams on what colleges taught in freshman survey courses. As the testing expanded over the next several decades, the board began providing a brief description of college-course themes and breaking down the percentage of those courses — and thus the A.P. exam — devoted to each topic. But it was up to each high school to flesh out its own curriculum.
And it did not take long for instructors to start teaching to the test, treating the board’s outline as the holy grail for helping students achieve the scores of 3 or higher, out of 5, that might earn credit from a college.
That obviously became harder to do as breakthroughs in genetic research and cellular organization, and momentous events like the cold war, the civil rights movement, Watergate and the war on terror, began to elbow their way onto the lists. College professors could pick and choose what to cover in their introductory survey classes. But because the A.P. test can touch on almost anything, high school juniors and seniors must now absorb more material than most college freshmen.
So perhaps it is no surprise that while the number of students taking the A.P. biology test has more than doubled since 1997, the median score has dropped to 2.63, from 3.18. On the exam last May, slightly fewer than half of the test-takers scored a 3, which equates to a C in a college course. And while 19 percent of students earned 5’s, almost twice that many got 1’s, which could be a failing grade in college.
A committee of the National Research Council, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, called attention to these problems in 2002. It criticized A.P. science courses for cramming in too much material and failing to let students design their own lab experiments. It also said the courses had failed to keep pace with research on how people learn: instead of listening to lectures, “more real learning takes place if students spend more time going into greater depth on fewer topics, allowing them to experience problem solving, controversies and the subtleties of scholarly investigation.”
A few top universities have become more choosey about giving credit. In 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, stopped giving credit for A.P. biology, and developed its own placement exam. Stuart Schmill, M.I.T.’s dean of admissions, says the biology department found that even some of the students who scored 5’s did not have the problem-solving skills needed for higher-level courses. The University of Texas has also tightened its rules for biology placement, giving credit for 5’s only, though many large universities still accept 4’s or 3’s.
Several elite private high schools have also dropped A.P. courses. In defiance, the public school district in Scarsdale, N.Y., created its own in-depth courses called Advanced Topics. (For college credit, students still have to do well on the A.P. or another placement exam.)
The College Board took the criticisms to heart, and has been working with hundreds of college professors and high school teachers to develop the new approach.
For biology, the change means paring down the entire field to four big ideas. The first is a simple statement that evolution “drives the diversity and unity of life.” The others emphasize the systematic nature of all living things: that they use energy and molecular building blocks to grow; respond to information essential to life processes; and interact in complex ways. Under each of these thoughts, a 61-page course framework lays out the most crucial knowledge students need to absorb.
And to the delight of teachers who have gotten an early peek at the plans, the board also makes clear what will not be on the exam. Part or all of at least 20 of the 56 chapters in the A.P. biology book that Mrs. Carlson’s class uses will no longer need to be covered. (One PowerPoint slide explaining the changes notes sardonically that teachers can retire their swift marches through the “Organ of the Day.”)
Similarly, the new plans divide United States history into nine time periods and seven overarching themes. But instead of requiring students to memorize the dates of the Pequot War — which, for those of you who forgot, occurred from 1634 to 1638 and eliminated the Pequot tribe in what is now Connecticut — teachers will have more leeway to focus on different events in teaching students how to craft historical arguments.
Scarsdale High School sees some synchronicity. “It appears to be clearly much more in line with what we are trying to emphasize this year,” says Beth Schoenbrun, the school’s’ co-director of Science Research. “It certainly seems to allow for a good deal more flexibility in terms of what is covered in the classroom.”
William Wood, who teaches biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was a key member of the National Research Council panel that criticized A.P. science. He says now: “I like the way they’ve tried to make it clear what the boundaries are, what they want students to actually remember and what can be left out.” He says he’s “pretty impressed” with what he’s seen so far.
MRS. CARLSON, who teaches A.P. bio at the Bancroft School, an affluent, private academy in central Massachusetts, has always made her lab an inviting place. A chalk-white skeleton watches over the students. So does Al, a rare clear gummy bear, in a paper-clip chair, surrounded by presents from students who view his lack of color as analogous to genetic mutations. He has a bag of mud from the Dead Sea, trinkets from Mount Fuji and a model of a fish from Bermuda.
Mrs. Carlson knows she is fortunate to have a board of directors that will buy whatever equipment she needs for the lab and a generous nine class periods a week for her A.P. course. Many teachers have to cover all the material in just five or six periods, and some must hold their labs after school or on holidays, if they have them at all — thanks to insufficient slots during the school day, and too many after-school activities.
Mrs. Carlson says several students drop her class each year after they realize how hard it will be. She is also frustrated by the predictable nature of many of the “dirty dozen,” the teachers’ nickname for the basic lab exercises now recommended by the College Board. In one that her class did last fall, the students looked at pre-stained slides of onion root tips to identify the stages of cell division and calculate the duration of the phases.
She and her students, who historically score 4’s and 5’s on the exam, were one of several schools asked by the College Board to road test one of the proposed new labs to see if it brought back the “Oh, wow!” factor.
The basic question: What factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in living plants? The new twist: Instead of being guided through the process, groups of two or three students had to dream up their own hypotheses and figure out how to test them.
Caroline Brown, a senior who stages the school’s plays, connected the lab to her passion for theater. She borrowed green, sky blue and “Broadway pink” filters from the playhouse to test how different shades of light affected photosynthesis in sunken spinach leaves. The pink surprised her by narrowly edging out the blue in triggering photosynthesis.
Ms. Brown had started to take both A.P. biology and A.P. United States history as a junior, but says she quickly realized that school counselors were right in warning “that’s one combination that will just about kill you.” So she stuck with history and went back to biology this year.
Robert Turley, a junior, created little disks of spinach with a hole puncher and dropped them into two beakers. He and his partner thought photosynthesis would occur more quickly in a slightly acidic solution, prompting those disks to shoot to the surface. But as they watched through safety goggles, all 10 of the disks in the basic solution rose, while none of disks in the more acidic solution budged.
“So for this lab, our hypothesis was actually wrong,” he says. “But it definitely felt more like a lab that would be done like a scientist in the real world than the other labs we’ve done.”
Even though Alyssa Kotin’s experiment was inconclusive, she and her partner presented a colorful poster with a graph of their findings to the class, just as the other groups did, to stimulate more discussion.
College Board officials say the new labs should help students learn how to frame scientific questions and assemble data, and the exam will measure how well they can apply those skills. When the new test is unveiled in 2013, biology students will need, for the first time, to use calculators, just as A.P. chemistry and physics students do. The board plans to cut the number of multiple-choice questions nearly in half on the new test, to 55. It will add five questions based on math calculations, and it will more than double the number of free-response questions, to nine.
“There won’t be any more questions like: here is a plant, and what is this tissue?” says Professor Uno of the University of Oklahoma, who is helping to decide what will be asked. Instead, early samples show that the multiple-choice questions will be more complex. They will require students to read short passages, or look at graphs, and pick the answers that explain why something happened or that predict what will occur next.
One sample essay question provides a chart with the heights of plants growing in either sunlight or shade and a graph that misinterprets the results. Students must decipher what went wrong, re-plot the data and design a better experiment to determine which grew faster.
WHILE many educators agree with the tack A.P. is taking, they also recognize that the change is going to be difficult for many teachers and schools.
Athena Vangos, who teaches A.P. biology at a public high school in Leicester, Mass., a blue-collar town where many students have part-time jobs, loves the idea of less memorization and more conceptual thinking. As is the case with many public schools, hers does not limit A.P. courses to only the top students. So while six of her students earned 4’s or 5’s on the exam last May, six others “just throw up their hands” at the amount of work and settled for 1’s.
While Ms. Vangos believes the program could inspire students who “like to think outside the box,” she worries that the new math requirements will discourage others. And with so many cutbacks these days in education budgets, she says, the need to improve lab facilities at many public schools “is absolutely going to pose a big problem.” Labs in resource-strapped urban schools often don’t have enough of even basic tools, like dissecting microscopes, for their students.
Studies indicate that relatively few high schools have laboratories equivalent to those used in first-year college courses. Professor Uno says that the new A.P. lab experiments will rely mostly on the same equipment as the old ones, and that program designers will provide “some low-cost alternatives where we can.”
Another concern is how well teachers — across the full range of A.P. subjects — will adjust to an approach that will require them to give up some control and let the students dictate more about where the class discussions go. Mr. Packer says the College Board is investing substantial resources in creating professional-development programs and online tools to help teachers make that transition.
In many ways, the changes will complete a broad turn for the College Board, from its origins as a purveyor of tests to a much more deliberate arbiter of what the nation’s top students will study. Its exams had already set that agenda indirectly, of course, and turned A.P. classes into a way of life for top students.
Yet as the board trumpets its new plans, it is also acknowledging how much the process had gotten out of hand. Students will still have to put in long hours, and there is no sign that the arms race will slow among students trying to pile up as many A.P. classes as they can to impress college admissions offices.
But, Mr. Packer says, the College Board supports the idea of schools’ placing limits on the number of A.P. classes students can take. And, he says, it sees the new courses as a step toward relieving some of the burdens.
The New A.P.
Advanced Placement is being redesigned to test more conceptual understanding. Click below for examples of the types of questions that will be found on the new U.S. history and biology tests.
Sample Questions: A.P. U.S. History»
Sample Questions: A.P. Biology »
Published: January 7, 2011
WHEN Joan Carlson started teaching high school biology more than 30 years ago, the Advanced Placement textbook was daunting enough, at 36 chapters and 870 pages. But as an explosion of research into cells and genes reshapes our sense of how life evolves, the flood of new material has been staggering. Mrs. Carlson’s A.P. class in Worcester, Mass., now confronts a book with 56 chapters and 1,400 pages, along with a profusion of animated videos and Web-based aids that supplement the text.
And what fuels the panic is that nearly every tongue-twisting term and microscopic fact is fair game for the year-end test that decides who will receive college credit for the course.
“Some of the students look at the book and say, ‘My gosh, it’s just like an encyclopedia,’ ” Mrs. Carlson says. And when new A.P. teachers encounter it, “they almost want to start sobbing.”
As A.P. has proliferated, spreading to more than 30 subjects with 1.8 million students taking 3.2 million tests, the program has won praise for giving students an early chance at more challenging work. But many of the courses, particularly in the sciences and history, have also been criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics. Students and educators alike say that biology, with 172,000 test-takers this year, is one of the worst offenders.
A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero-sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery.
All that, says the College Board, is about to change.
Next month, the board, the nonprofit organization that owns the A.P. exams as well as the SAT, will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history — with 387,000 test-takers the most popular A.P. subject. A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. In biology, a host of more creative, hands-on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists.
The changes, which are to take effect in the 2012-13 school year, are part of a sweeping redesign of the entire A.P. program. Instead of just providing teachers with a list of points that need to be covered for the exams, the College Board will create these detailed standards for each subject and create new exams to match.
Trevor Packer, the College Board’s vice president for Advanced Placement, notes that the changes mark a new direction for the board, which has focused on the tests more than the courses. The rollout of “the New A.P.,” as the board describes it, will actually start this year with a new curriculum taking effect in two smaller programs, German and French language. Major revisions to physics, chemistry, European history, world history and art history will follow, with the hope of being ready for exams in 2014 or 2015.
“We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” Mr. Packer says. A.P. teachers made clear that such a shift was impossible unless the breadth of material covered was pared down. Courses in English and math are manageable, Mr. Packer says, and will not be revised until later.
The new approach is important because critical thinking skills are considered essential for advanced college courses and jobs in today’s information-based economy. College administrators and veteran A.P. teachers familiar with the new biology curriculum believe the changes could have significant reverberations for how science is taught in introductory college classes and even elementary school classrooms, and might bring some of the excitement back to science learning.
And here is one indication of how pumped up the College Board is about the revitalization: If Mr. Packer were a high school junior next year, would he take the old A.P. biology or wait till his senior year for the new one?
“I would absolutely wait,” he says.
WHEN A.P. testing began in 1956, memorization was not yet a dirty word, and it was O.K. if history classes ran out of time just after they finished World War II.
The College Board created the first exams at the behest of elite preparatory schools, which wanted to convince colleges that their best students could dart right into advanced work. The board based the exams on what colleges taught in freshman survey courses. As the testing expanded over the next several decades, the board began providing a brief description of college-course themes and breaking down the percentage of those courses — and thus the A.P. exam — devoted to each topic. But it was up to each high school to flesh out its own curriculum.
And it did not take long for instructors to start teaching to the test, treating the board’s outline as the holy grail for helping students achieve the scores of 3 or higher, out of 5, that might earn credit from a college.
That obviously became harder to do as breakthroughs in genetic research and cellular organization, and momentous events like the cold war, the civil rights movement, Watergate and the war on terror, began to elbow their way onto the lists. College professors could pick and choose what to cover in their introductory survey classes. But because the A.P. test can touch on almost anything, high school juniors and seniors must now absorb more material than most college freshmen.
So perhaps it is no surprise that while the number of students taking the A.P. biology test has more than doubled since 1997, the median score has dropped to 2.63, from 3.18. On the exam last May, slightly fewer than half of the test-takers scored a 3, which equates to a C in a college course. And while 19 percent of students earned 5’s, almost twice that many got 1’s, which could be a failing grade in college.
A committee of the National Research Council, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, called attention to these problems in 2002. It criticized A.P. science courses for cramming in too much material and failing to let students design their own lab experiments. It also said the courses had failed to keep pace with research on how people learn: instead of listening to lectures, “more real learning takes place if students spend more time going into greater depth on fewer topics, allowing them to experience problem solving, controversies and the subtleties of scholarly investigation.”
A few top universities have become more choosey about giving credit. In 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, stopped giving credit for A.P. biology, and developed its own placement exam. Stuart Schmill, M.I.T.’s dean of admissions, says the biology department found that even some of the students who scored 5’s did not have the problem-solving skills needed for higher-level courses. The University of Texas has also tightened its rules for biology placement, giving credit for 5’s only, though many large universities still accept 4’s or 3’s.
Several elite private high schools have also dropped A.P. courses. In defiance, the public school district in Scarsdale, N.Y., created its own in-depth courses called Advanced Topics. (For college credit, students still have to do well on the A.P. or another placement exam.)
The College Board took the criticisms to heart, and has been working with hundreds of college professors and high school teachers to develop the new approach.
For biology, the change means paring down the entire field to four big ideas. The first is a simple statement that evolution “drives the diversity and unity of life.” The others emphasize the systematic nature of all living things: that they use energy and molecular building blocks to grow; respond to information essential to life processes; and interact in complex ways. Under each of these thoughts, a 61-page course framework lays out the most crucial knowledge students need to absorb.
And to the delight of teachers who have gotten an early peek at the plans, the board also makes clear what will not be on the exam. Part or all of at least 20 of the 56 chapters in the A.P. biology book that Mrs. Carlson’s class uses will no longer need to be covered. (One PowerPoint slide explaining the changes notes sardonically that teachers can retire their swift marches through the “Organ of the Day.”)
Similarly, the new plans divide United States history into nine time periods and seven overarching themes. But instead of requiring students to memorize the dates of the Pequot War — which, for those of you who forgot, occurred from 1634 to 1638 and eliminated the Pequot tribe in what is now Connecticut — teachers will have more leeway to focus on different events in teaching students how to craft historical arguments.
Scarsdale High School sees some synchronicity. “It appears to be clearly much more in line with what we are trying to emphasize this year,” says Beth Schoenbrun, the school’s’ co-director of Science Research. “It certainly seems to allow for a good deal more flexibility in terms of what is covered in the classroom.”
William Wood, who teaches biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was a key member of the National Research Council panel that criticized A.P. science. He says now: “I like the way they’ve tried to make it clear what the boundaries are, what they want students to actually remember and what can be left out.” He says he’s “pretty impressed” with what he’s seen so far.
MRS. CARLSON, who teaches A.P. bio at the Bancroft School, an affluent, private academy in central Massachusetts, has always made her lab an inviting place. A chalk-white skeleton watches over the students. So does Al, a rare clear gummy bear, in a paper-clip chair, surrounded by presents from students who view his lack of color as analogous to genetic mutations. He has a bag of mud from the Dead Sea, trinkets from Mount Fuji and a model of a fish from Bermuda.
Mrs. Carlson knows she is fortunate to have a board of directors that will buy whatever equipment she needs for the lab and a generous nine class periods a week for her A.P. course. Many teachers have to cover all the material in just five or six periods, and some must hold their labs after school or on holidays, if they have them at all — thanks to insufficient slots during the school day, and too many after-school activities.
Mrs. Carlson says several students drop her class each year after they realize how hard it will be. She is also frustrated by the predictable nature of many of the “dirty dozen,” the teachers’ nickname for the basic lab exercises now recommended by the College Board. In one that her class did last fall, the students looked at pre-stained slides of onion root tips to identify the stages of cell division and calculate the duration of the phases.
She and her students, who historically score 4’s and 5’s on the exam, were one of several schools asked by the College Board to road test one of the proposed new labs to see if it brought back the “Oh, wow!” factor.
The basic question: What factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in living plants? The new twist: Instead of being guided through the process, groups of two or three students had to dream up their own hypotheses and figure out how to test them.
Caroline Brown, a senior who stages the school’s plays, connected the lab to her passion for theater. She borrowed green, sky blue and “Broadway pink” filters from the playhouse to test how different shades of light affected photosynthesis in sunken spinach leaves. The pink surprised her by narrowly edging out the blue in triggering photosynthesis.
Ms. Brown had started to take both A.P. biology and A.P. United States history as a junior, but says she quickly realized that school counselors were right in warning “that’s one combination that will just about kill you.” So she stuck with history and went back to biology this year.
Robert Turley, a junior, created little disks of spinach with a hole puncher and dropped them into two beakers. He and his partner thought photosynthesis would occur more quickly in a slightly acidic solution, prompting those disks to shoot to the surface. But as they watched through safety goggles, all 10 of the disks in the basic solution rose, while none of disks in the more acidic solution budged.
“So for this lab, our hypothesis was actually wrong,” he says. “But it definitely felt more like a lab that would be done like a scientist in the real world than the other labs we’ve done.”
Even though Alyssa Kotin’s experiment was inconclusive, she and her partner presented a colorful poster with a graph of their findings to the class, just as the other groups did, to stimulate more discussion.
College Board officials say the new labs should help students learn how to frame scientific questions and assemble data, and the exam will measure how well they can apply those skills. When the new test is unveiled in 2013, biology students will need, for the first time, to use calculators, just as A.P. chemistry and physics students do. The board plans to cut the number of multiple-choice questions nearly in half on the new test, to 55. It will add five questions based on math calculations, and it will more than double the number of free-response questions, to nine.
“There won’t be any more questions like: here is a plant, and what is this tissue?” says Professor Uno of the University of Oklahoma, who is helping to decide what will be asked. Instead, early samples show that the multiple-choice questions will be more complex. They will require students to read short passages, or look at graphs, and pick the answers that explain why something happened or that predict what will occur next.
One sample essay question provides a chart with the heights of plants growing in either sunlight or shade and a graph that misinterprets the results. Students must decipher what went wrong, re-plot the data and design a better experiment to determine which grew faster.
WHILE many educators agree with the tack A.P. is taking, they also recognize that the change is going to be difficult for many teachers and schools.
Athena Vangos, who teaches A.P. biology at a public high school in Leicester, Mass., a blue-collar town where many students have part-time jobs, loves the idea of less memorization and more conceptual thinking. As is the case with many public schools, hers does not limit A.P. courses to only the top students. So while six of her students earned 4’s or 5’s on the exam last May, six others “just throw up their hands” at the amount of work and settled for 1’s.
While Ms. Vangos believes the program could inspire students who “like to think outside the box,” she worries that the new math requirements will discourage others. And with so many cutbacks these days in education budgets, she says, the need to improve lab facilities at many public schools “is absolutely going to pose a big problem.” Labs in resource-strapped urban schools often don’t have enough of even basic tools, like dissecting microscopes, for their students.
Studies indicate that relatively few high schools have laboratories equivalent to those used in first-year college courses. Professor Uno says that the new A.P. lab experiments will rely mostly on the same equipment as the old ones, and that program designers will provide “some low-cost alternatives where we can.”
Another concern is how well teachers — across the full range of A.P. subjects — will adjust to an approach that will require them to give up some control and let the students dictate more about where the class discussions go. Mr. Packer says the College Board is investing substantial resources in creating professional-development programs and online tools to help teachers make that transition.
In many ways, the changes will complete a broad turn for the College Board, from its origins as a purveyor of tests to a much more deliberate arbiter of what the nation’s top students will study. Its exams had already set that agenda indirectly, of course, and turned A.P. classes into a way of life for top students.
Yet as the board trumpets its new plans, it is also acknowledging how much the process had gotten out of hand. Students will still have to put in long hours, and there is no sign that the arms race will slow among students trying to pile up as many A.P. classes as they can to impress college admissions offices.
But, Mr. Packer says, the College Board supports the idea of schools’ placing limits on the number of A.P. classes students can take. And, he says, it sees the new courses as a step toward relieving some of the burdens.
The New A.P.
Advanced Placement is being redesigned to test more conceptual understanding. Click below for examples of the types of questions that will be found on the new U.S. history and biology tests.
Sample Questions: A.P. U.S. History»
Sample Questions: A.P. Biology »
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