Advanced Placement Chemistry Research Articles

UC Davis chemistry professor fired after investigation for alleged sexual assault of a high school student

Ting Guo, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Davis, was fired by the UC Board of Regents Jan. 19 after an investigation into whether he raped a high school student he was mentoring in 2010. UC Davis released a statement Jan. 12 confirming the investigation. Guo had been on paid leave since January 2021. Guo was named in a 2020 civil lawsuit by the student, listed as Jane Doe. The suit says that in 2010, the student, who lived in Davis, met Guo after her Advanced Placement chemistry teacher asked the class to shadow a chemist. Guo continued to mentor the student after that initial meeting. Several months later, the student took gifts to Guo at his Davis home, where he raped her, according to the lawsuit. Guo raped the student two more times in separate incidents, also at his home. In one case he offered to give

Intersectional Analysis of Advanced Placement Chemistry Enrollment and Performance by Gender and Ethnicity

Intersectional Analysis of Advanced Placement Chemistry Enrollment and Performance by Gender and Ethnicity

Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Supporting Adoption of Evidence-Based Practices in Response to Educational Disruptions

Effective diffusion of educational innovations is essential for evidence-based practices to have broad impacts on student learning. One of the barriers to such diffusion is the large inertia associated with changing one’s teaching practices. Educational disruptions, such as COVID-19, may lower this barrier by making business-as-usual no longer feasible. Here, we reflect on the ways in which an online community, designed to promote diffusion of educational innovation, supported Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry teachers in the rapid transition to online instruction necessitated by the pandemic. The lessons learned from supporting teachers as they responded to the pandemic may provide insights into how to better promote and support adoption of reformed teaching strategies.

Glitches mar AP Chem exam

High school students around the world took the Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry exam on May 14, but for many students the relief they should have felt at completing a difficult test quickly turned...

Identifying Levers Related to Student Performance on High-Stakes Science Exams: Examining School, Teaching, Teacher, and Professional Development Characteristics

BackgroundMany students enter into postsecondary education without the preparation to face the demands of postsecondary coursework in science. Increasingly, policymakers and educational researchers are responding to calls for reforming secondary education to provide more opportunity for all students to receive high-quality education and to become career and college ready.PurposeThis study attempts to identify levers to increase student learning in secondary education. In particular, it examines relationships between school, teaching, teacher, and teacher professional development characteristics and student scores on high-stakes Advanced Placement (AP) examinations in the sciences.SettingThis study is situated in the context of the large-scale, top-down, nationwide AP curriculum and examination reform in the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics) in the United States. This is an unprecedented opportunity to analyze changing educational landscapes in the United States with large-scale national student-, teacher-, school-, and district-level datasets across multiple science disciplines and different stages of the curriculum reform implementation connected to a standardized and high-stakes student outcome measure.PopulationThis study analyzes nationwide data samples of the AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and AP Physics population during the first, second, and third year of the curriculum reform implementation. Across disciplines and years, the analytical samples include a total of 113,603 students and 6,046 teachers.Research DesignThis empirical quantitative study uses data from web-based surveys sent to all AP science teachers. Additionally, the College Board provided student- and school-level data for all students taking AP examinations. Data preparation methods included exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Associations with student achievement were analyzed through a multilevel ordered logistic regression analysis, separately by science discipline and year of the curriculum reform implementation. Afterwards, results were aggregated through a meta-analysis.FindingsEven after controlling for student background variables, roughly 60% of the AP score variance could be explained at the teacher and school levels. In particular, teachers’ perceived administrative support, self-efficacy, teaching experience, and elements of classroom instruction were related to student performance. Notably, teachers’ professional development participation—which has been a major focus of interventions—has a small, mixed impact on student achievement.ConclusionThe identified levers for improving student achievement provide a strong rationale for the continued efforts of policymakers to improve school environments and to support science teachers, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning to help all students to be prepared for college and ready for their future careers.

From the Inside Out: Teacher Responses to the AP Curriculum Redesign

ABSTRACTFrom 2012–2015, Advanced Placement (AP) science courses underwent a large-scale curricular reform to include more scientific inquiry and reasoning, reduce emphasis on broad content coverage, and focus on depth of understanding, with corresponding changes in high-stakes AP examinations. In this study, we explored how teachers prepared for and adapted to this reform over a three-year period. Data included four waves of individual interviews with 22 AP Biology and Chemistry teachers across the United States. Data were qualitatively analyzed using emic and etic coding. Four themes were developed from these data: (1) initial perceptions about the reform including uncertainty, anxiety, and excitement, (2) preparation for reform, (3) impact of time, and (4) intersection of affinity toward the reform with time and uncertainty. Although teachers faced a variety of implementation challenges, these did not always influence their professional development (PD) choices. Rather, choices were more often driven by the price and proximity of those activities, resulting in a jumbled mélange rather than a coherent, extended series of learning experiences. Despite a variety of attitudes, beliefs and instructional skills, teacher beliefs about the purpose and value of the reform—over and above their learning experiences—influenced the time needed to transition and to become comfortable with the redesigned course. This study has implications for how teachers may respond to large-scale, top-down, curriculum reforms (e.g., NGSS, Common Core) and how education leaders, policy makers, and PD providers might support teachers in their efforts to adapt efficiently and effectively.

The Purple Flask: A Novel Reformulation of the Blue Bottle Reaction

Herein we describe The Purple Flask, a novel color-changing redox reaction that uses ascorbic acid as an electron donor, atmospheric oxygen as an electron acceptor, a copper–iron mixture as a redox catalyst, and the purple phenothiazine dye thionine as redox indicator. This formulation has several advantages over other versions of the classic “blue bottle” reaction for classroom demonstrations: (i) It uses noncaustic chemicals and proceeds at mildly acidic pH 4.2. (ii) The purple color generated by the oxidation reaction is intense, but fades rapidly. (iii) The reduction reaction rate is very temperature sensitive, which enables exploration of the impact of temperature on reaction kinetics. The Purple Flask is a vivid classroom demonstration that quickly captures student attention and can be used to illustrate the principles of redox chemistry in settings ranging from middle school through high school advanced placement chemistry and introductory college chemistry.

Life on the Frontier of AP Expansion: Can Schools in Less-Resourced Communities Successfully Implement Advanced Placement Science Courses?

The Advanced Placement (AP) program has undergone two major reforms in recent decades: the first aimed at increasing access and the second at increasing relevance. Both initiatives are partially designed to increase the number of high school students from low-income backgrounds who have access to college-level coursework. Yet critics argue that schools in less-resourced communities are unable to implement AP at the level expected by its founders. We offer the first model of the components inherent in a well-implemented AP science course and the first evaluation of AP implementation with a focus on public schools newly offering the inquiry-based version of AP Biology and Chemistry courses. We find that these frontier schools were able to implement most, but not all, of the key components of an AP science course.

C&EN talks with James B. Comey, chemistry major turned US FBI director

James B. Comey, author of thebest-selling book A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, directed the US Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2013 to 2017. Comey spoke with C&EN senior correspondent Cheryl Hogue. They both graduated from the College of William and Mary, and their stints on the student newspaper, The Flat Hat, overlapped. This interview was edited for length and clarity. What sparked your interest in chemistry? In high school, I was interested in becoming a physician and took the hard sciences: biology, chemistry, physics, and Advanced Placement chemistry. I wouldn’t say I was so much interested in chemistry as opposed to bio, but I was interested in the sciences as a path to becoming a doctor. You started out as a chemistry major in college. Why? I saw all the really aggressive premed nerds were flowing to bio—and those people made me extremely nervous. So I thought, to

Adapting to the Large-Scale Advanced Placement Chemistry Reform: An Examination of Teachers’ Challenges and Instructional Practices

This quantitative study describes how teachers responded to the large-scale, top-down, mandated curriculum and examination reform of the Advanced Placement (AP) program in chemistry. This study analyzed data from a nationwide sample of teachers (N = 1,062) teaching redesigned AP Chemistry courses in the first two years of the curriculum reform. Repeated measures analysis of covariance (RM-ANCOVA) indicated that teachers’ perceived challenges about the AP redesign substantially decreased once they gained more experience teaching redesigned AP Chemistry courses. Teachers reported that inquiry laboratory investigations and changes in the AP examinations were the most challenging aspect of the curriculum reform, whereas the use of new textbooks and chemistry content was perceived as the least challenging. With respect to classroom practices, teachers more frequently enacted instructional elements directly related to the AP examination instead of incorporating references to core elements of the curriculum reform in their instruction. Similarly, though teachers reported frequently conducting laboratory investigations in their classrooms, only about 25% of the laboratory investigations included elements of student-generated inquiry, an important component of the redesigned AP Chemistry program. Surprisingly, teachers’ self-reported classroom instruction remained similar in both the first year and the second year of the AP redesign. In general, this study suggests that school leaders and administrators should not be discouraged when teachers experience challenges during early phases of curriculum reforms. Adaptation to reform takes time. However, teachers may need special encouragement to adopt more in-depth aspects of curriculum reforms.

Measuring Yeast Fermentation Kinetics with a Homemade Water Displacement Volumetric Gasometer

A simple homemade water displacement volumetric gasometer constructed from plastic water bottles, plastic tubing, and a graduated cylinder was used to measure the evolution of carbon dioxide by the fermentation of sugars by baker’s yeast. The apparatus provides reproducible, quantitative data that can be graphed to display phenomena such as induction lag time, steady-state growth, and nutrient depletion, and can be used to demonstrate the effect of a variety of conditions (such as carbohydrate type and concentration, inhibitors, pH, and temperature) on yeast fermentation kinetics. Advanced students can use the gasometer to calculate kinetic parameters such as the Michaelis constant, maximal velocity, and activation energy. The gasometer can be a versatile tool for exploring the principles of fermentation and enzyme kinetics in science laboratories ranging from elementary school to high school advanced placement chemistry and first-year college chemistry.

Bringing NMR and IR Spectroscopy to High Schools

Development of benchtop, portable Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and infrared (IR) spectrometers has opened up opportunities for creating university–high school partnerships that provide high school students with hands-on experience with NMR and IR instruments. With recent changes to the international baccalaureate chemistry and advanced placement chemistry curricula, NMR and IR spectroscopy can be mapped directly to content that is already built into general, organic, and materials courses offered at the high school level. We developed a program in which the university provides professional development opportunities to high school chemistry teachers and further opportunities for these teachers to bring benchtop NMR and IR instruments directly into their own classrooms. This partnership not only benefits students by providing unique active learning experiences, but also offers opportunities for high school teachers’ professional development through on-campus training workshops. These p...

When Do Students in Low-SES Schools Perform Better-Than-Expected on a High-Stakes Test? Analyzing School, Teacher, Teaching, and Professional Development Characteristics

This empirical study analyzed data from 638 teachers and 11,800 students in low-socioeconomic status (SES) urban schools (and schools with urban characteristics) exploring associations of school, teacher, teaching, and professional development characteristics toward student performance on the revised Advanced Placement (AP) Biology and AP Chemistry examinations. The analyses indicated that districts per-student funding allocations, the days of instruction, teachers’ knowledge and experience, and some aspects of teachers’ professional development participation were significantly associated with student performance on AP science examinations that was better than predicted by students’ Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) scores.

Practice of Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry in a Chinese High School

Practice of Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry in a Chinese High School

Computer-Aided Drug Design

Chemistry in high school is often presented as a jumbled mass of topics drawn from inorganic, analytical, and physical sub-disciplines. With no central theme to build on, students may have trouble grasping the chemical sciences as a coherent field. We believe that a relevant, compelling, accessible framework might better engage students in chemistry. In this article, we describe an activity aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013; see box, p. 46) that integrates different facets of chemistry and biology into a scaffold structured around small-molecule medicinal drug discovery. This investigation was inspired by laboratory work the authors--a researcher (RS) and a high school teacher (JE)--undertook to pursue a new class of historie deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors (Wang et al. 2015). Small-molecule therapies, forged by evolution or human effort--from antibiotics to chemotherapeutics to anti-retrovirals--can combat many of the maladies that plague humanity. Despite past successes, current therapies are not guaranteed to work forever, and further development of molecular medicines is always required. The constant arms race against antibiotic-resistant bacteria serves as one example of the perpetual need for new therapies. To discover new medicinal molecules, intrepid chemists often must obtain and modify a lead compound of interest. Leads may arise either from nature or through the screening of large compound libraries against protein targets relevant to a particular disease. Once a lead is found, medicinal chemists must modify it through the iterative creation of structurally related analogs in order to arrive at a potent, selective, and relatively non-toxic clinical candidate. Modern biomedical researchers can model the interactions between small molecules and their macromolecular target on a computer and thereby plan structural modifications that seem most likely to increase compound tightness of binding. Through the use of these in silico (computer-based) models, scientists can bias those molecules they make in the lab on the basis of binding affinity predictions resultant from virtual screens containing millions of small molecules. The rapid increase in both personal computing power and efficient algorithms for small molecule binding-mode prediction has enabled researchers to access computer-aided molecular docking tools using commercially available laptops--a feat that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Throughout this exercise, students assume the role of medicinal chemists searching for a new anticancer medicine by pursuing (structurally similar) analogs to a chemotherapeutic lead compound of interest. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Software tools Free software tools (Figure 1) can help students explore small molecule-protein interactions. For example, students can use AutoDockTools (Huey et al. 2007; Morris et al. 2009; Morris et al. 1998) to prepare the crystallographic macromolecule representation obtained from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) for screening; the PDB offers free downloadable macromolecular structures (including many disease targets). AutoDock Vina (Trott and Olson 2010) can perform the molecular dynamics calculations necessary to generate binding mode predictions, and PyRx (Wolf 2009) can provide the graphical user interface (GUI) for all screening protocols. Inhibitors may be visualized using Schrodinger LLC's Pymol software (Pymol 2015). Ligand preparation requires Marvin-sketch and Marvinview (Marvin 2016). To implement this challenging activity, teachers may need a refresher in organic chemistry, biochemistry, and/or molecular biology. Students need a background in chemistry and biology. Our class--an advanced placement (AP) chemistry course--was our students' second chemistry class, and most students had already taken AP biology (or an equivalent course). For help understanding computer-aided drug design, see the References section and the On the web section for links to helpful videos and supplemental information. …

Use of chemistry software to teach and assess model-based reaction and equation knowledge

This study investgated the challenges students face when learning chemical reactons in a frst-year chemistry course and the efectveness of a curriculum and sofware implementaton that was used to teach and assess student understanding of chemical reactons and equatons. This study took place over a two year period in a public suburban high-school, in southwestern USA. Two advanced placement (AP) chemistry classes partcipated, referred to here as study group A (year 1), N = 14; and study group B (year 2), N = 21. The curriculum for a frst-year chemistry course ( group A) was revised to include instructon on reacton-types. The second year of the study involved the creaton and implementaton of a sofware soluton which promoted mastery learning of reacton-types. Students in both groups benefted from the reacton-type curriculum and achieved profciency in chemical reactons and equatons. The fndings suggest there was an added learning beneft to using the reacton-type sofware soluton. This study also found that reacton knowledge was a moderate to strong predictor of chemistry achievement. Based on regression analysis, reacton knowledge signifcantly predicted chemistry achievement for both groups.

Introducing the Journal of Chemical Education’s “Special Issue: Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry”

The College Board has released a new framework for the advanced placement (AP) chemistry course and exam emphasizing big ideas, enduring understandings, and science practices; concomitant instructional changes are underway. In response to a call for papers on the AP chemistry curriculum and assessment redesign, chemistry educators at the high school and college levels have contributed papers collected in the special issue on AP chemistry and briefly summarized here. Ideas for continuing this dialogue in the future are also provided. Papers in the “Journal of Chemical Education Special Issue: Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry” have a designation that they are part of this collection.

Assessing Advanced High School and Undergraduate Students’ Thinking Skills: The Chemistry—From the Nanoscale to Microelectronics Module

Chemistry students in Israel have two options for studying chemistry: basic or honors (advanced placement). For instruction in high school honors chemistry courses, we developed a module focusing on abstract topics in quantum mechanics: Chemistry—From the Nanoscale to Microelectronics. The module adopts a visual–conceptual approach, which replaces mathematical derivations and includes interdisciplinary, real-life applications. The module has also been used as enrichment material for an undergraduate mathematically oriented quantum chemistry course. We assessed the comprehension of quantum mechanical concepts and the thinking skills of high school honors students and undergraduate chemistry students who studied this module. These skills included visual and textual chemical understanding, graphing, and far transfer of learning. Participants included over 100 high school honors students in high and intermediate levels, and over 60 undergraduate students, with students separated into groups of those exposed to the module and those who received mathematics enrichment instead. The questionnaires revealed that both high school honors students and undergraduate students improved their scores. High-level academic students outperformed their undergraduate peers, and undergraduate students who had been exposed to the module outperformed undergraduates who had studied the topic with mathematical enrichment. The research contributes to the field of teaching quantum mechanics and thinking skills, suggesting that high school honors students and undergraduate students could benefit from studying quantum mechanics using a visual–conceptual approach along with real-life applications. This contribution is part of a special issue on teaching introductory chemistry in the context of the advanced placement (AP) chemistry course redesign.

Integrating Particulate Representations into AP Chemistry and Introductory Chemistry Courses

The College Board’s recently revised curriculum for advanced placement (AP) chemistry places a strong emphasis on conceptual understanding, including representations of particle phenomena. This change in emphasis is informed by years of research showing that students could perform algorithmic calculations but not explain those calculations using particulate representations. This article provides a discussion of particulate representations in chemistry and specific examples of ways to introduce particulate representations to students and to integrate them throughout the AP chemistry or any introductory chemistry course. This contribution is part of a special issue on teaching introductory chemistry in the context of the advanced placement chemistry course redesign.

The New AP Chemistry Exam: Its Rationale, Content, and Scoring

The 2013–2014 academic year marks the rollout of the redesigned advanced placement (AP) chemistry course and exam. There have been many questions as to why the course was redesigned and how the new examination will differ from its legacy version. In this article we give a brief overview of the legacy course and examine why a redesign occurred in the context of best practices in chemistry education. Using specific examples, we outline changes to the exam format and content, and discuss how the scoring process (the AP Reading) and the AP score setting are carried out. This contribution is part of a special issue on teaching introductory chemistry in the context of the advanced placement chemistry course redesign.