Advanced Placement Human Geography Research Articles

Advanced Placement Human Geography Exam Participation and Performance in Texas School Districts

Texas is the state with the largest number of students taking the Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography exam. State policy allows schools to offer AP Human Geography in ninth grade as a substitute for the on-level World Geography Studies course. AP’s growth in Texas has been driven by state policy that financially incentivizes students, teachers, and schools to participate in the program. This article examines changes in the geographic distribution of AP Human Geography course offerings and exam results in school districts across the state. Using data provided by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), AP Human Geography exam participation rates and scores were mapped for the period from 2014 to 2019. The results show the number of districts with low rates of qualifying scores has increased in each participation category with fifty-seven additional low-qualifying districts in 2019 compared to 2014. Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps exist in many schools, calling into question the inequitable impacts of the state’s AP incentives and the practice of using AP Human Geography as a warmup AP course. Texas school districts should improve the preparation of students for advanced course work. Researchers can further explore district-level AP participation and performance through case studies and other methods.

Twenty Years of Advanced Placement Human Geography: A Program Assessment

This Focus section of The Professional Geographer contains four articles that were prepared for a program assessment of Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography. Using twenty years of AP program data, the authors probe into the participation of students in the course and how they fared on the exam. AP exam data were analyzed at the national, state, and district-level scales as well as for students differentiated by grade level, race, ethnicity, and gender. The Focus section concludes with a commentary that mulls the private and public values of a geography course in the AP program. This introduction presents the rationale for the program assessment, a summary of the key findings, and a call for geographers to improve the effectiveness of AP Human Geography while supporting research–practice partnerships, dual enrollment programs, and other locally conceived and tailored alternatives to corporate authority, prescriptive curriculum, and standardization in public education. An ongoing assessment of AP Human Geography is recommended as part of a broader discipline-based effort to strengthen and secure the status of geography in U.S. education.

Advanced Placement Human Geography: Program Access and Effectiveness by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender, 2001–2020

Advanced Placement (AP) is a program initially developed by the College Board to engage “superior” high school students with rigorous college-equivalent coursework. Because the AP program has the potential to facilitate the college placement and success of diverse youth, the College Board has made equitable AP access a core objective. This article reports the results of an assessment conducted to gain a better understanding of the number and characteristics of students who have participated in AP Human Geography and how they fared on the exam. Although AP Human Geography enrollments have grown more diverse since the program’s launch in 2001, unequal access to the course remains a challenge. Unequal outcomes on AP Human Geography exams are also evident when comparing mean scores and qualifying scores by race, ethnicity, and gender. The effectiveness of AP Human Geography for youth of color is compromised by the inordinate number of exams taken in ninth grade, a point in schooling characterized by widespread and embedded geography achievement disadvantages and unequal educational opportunities. Ensuring the equitable preparation of students for advanced geography coursework and fostering racial and gender equity in the curriculum are among the reforms recommended to reduce inequality in AP exam scores.

Why AP Human Geography?

This commentary attempts to contextualize the articles in this issue by interrogating the purpose of Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography. Why should students learn geography? Why should they learn geography as an “AP” course—one that indicates college-level challenge and the potential for college credit? Leveraging David Labaree’s consideration about the public and private purposes of education—social mobility, economic efficiency, and democratic equality—the analysis considers the value of the course to students, their communities, and our country. The commentary concludes that on these three counts, the value of AP Human Geography is mixed. Although the course has potential to further all three goals of education, there remain challenges—some inherent to the AP program, and others specific to AP Human Geography.

Advanced Placement Human Geography: Program Access and Effectiveness by Grade Level, 2001–2020

Since 2001, the Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography program has grown substantially in terms of the sheer number of students taking the course and exam. The program’s growth curve is a marker of increased exposure to complex subject matter in high schools, which is a core AP objective. Viewing AP Human Geography’s growth in the aggregate, however, masks the program’s unequal record of supporting the second fundamental goal of AP, which is to facilitate the college transition of participating students. By grade level, the highest AP Human Geography exam scores on average were earned by high school juniors and seniors. Most of the exams were primarily taken by students in ninth grade outside of New England and the Middle Atlantic. Students in Texas and Florida together accounted for 35 percent of the exams in the peak year of 2019. AP Human Geography’s unintended status as a warmup AP course places it at odds with the College Board’s AP guidance and contemporaneous reports that most students start high school lacking the knowledge and skills for advanced geography coursework. The geography education of younger students would be better served by on-level geography courses and placement tests that are predictive of AP performance later in high school.

How Inclusive, Diverse, and Equitable Is Advanced Placement Human Geography? A Comparison of Participation and Performance by Ethnicity and Race

The Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography course offers a geographic perspective for students to study differences, dynamics, and disparities in society and the globalized world. This article seeks to relate this thematic diversity to the profile, participation, and performance of the exam takers in comparison to other subjects, with a special emphasis on race and ethnicity. The online database on AP exams released annually by the College Board served as a starting point to analyze data on exam scores by subject and ethnic group. The results point out that participation and scores are improving for ethnic minority groups, especially for Black students, but their achievements remain below the average grades and the performance by those of other ethnicities. It is suggested that measures and policies beyond participation and effectiveness and with a focus on equity are necessary to overcome structural inequalities in teaching and learning. AP Human Geography should not only be conceived as a diverse discipline, but also as a critical and inclusive social science to support ethnic minority students and other marginalized groups to be successful in their education.

A Bridge between Two Worlds: Why Advanced Placement Human Geography Is Good for the Discipline of Geography

Amidst ongoing debates regarding the pros and cons of Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) for the field of geography, this article asks whether it has been good for the discipline in the United States. The authors argue that APHG has strengthened U.S. geography because it has been remarkably effective at building bridges between high school and college geography educators, providing professional development opportunities for K–12 teachers, supporting the pipeline of new geographers entering college classrooms, offering a rigorous and comprehensive course, and increasing the number of K–12 students who have been exposed to geography. Rather than focusing on narrower questions about test performance, this article contributes to the literature by assessing the broad question of whether APHG is good for the discipline and by shedding light on the connections APHG has fostered between the often separate worlds of university professors and high school teachers. These insights are based on empirical evidence as well as several decades of combined author experiences at APHG readings.

Out of Eden Walk: Bridging the Advanced Placement Human Geography and World History Courses

Out of Eden Walk: Bridging the Advanced Placement Human Geography and World History Courses

Advanced Placement Human Geography: Time for a Reappraisal?

Advanced Placement Human Geography: Time for a Reappraisal?

Geography’s Position in Education Today

The objective of this article is to assess the position of geography in the United States by examining the educational organizations that serve geography. Specifically, I detail four pieces of evidence: (1) the number and distribution of higher education institutions that offer geography; (2) trends in the number and diversity of geography majors; (3) state geography requirements for middle and high schools; and (4) the growth in Advanced Placement Human Geography and its distribution by states. Retaining a strong institutional presence in geography is vital given the precarious status of the discipline. I call for a more systematic approach to collecting and disseminating data on the health of our discipline to ensure its long-term survival. These steps are currently being taken by the American Association of Geographers and will result in a more robust data infrastructure.

Geography Deserts: State and Regional Variation in the Formal Opportunity to Learn Geography in the United States, 2005–2015

The formal opportunity to learn geography in the United States is unevenly distributed across space, creating possible geography deserts. Data on the number of exams taken in Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) and bachelor’s degrees earned in geography are mapped at the state and regional scales. Normalized rates are ranked and grouped into quintiles. For APHG exams, states in the southeastern region of the United States are in the uppermost quintiles while states in the northeastern region are in the lowermost quintiles. The pattern for bachelor’s degrees in geography is somewhat the spatial inverse of that for APHG.

Teaching Spatial Thinking with the National Atlas of Korea in U.S. Secondary Level Education

Abstract. This paper is predicated on the body of literature that supports a theoretical concept that middle and high school age children possess the cognitive ability to understand thematic maps and achieve some degree of cartographic literacy. In 2006, the US National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies published a landmark book on Learning to Think Spatially. This book documented essential secondary education components and various aspects of teaching spatial thinking. The NRC defines spatial thinking as “a form of thinking based on a constructive amalgam of three elements: concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning” (NRC, 2006, ix). This paper is an attempt to document and understand some of the attributes associated with these three elements. Specifically, it aims to find ways that can effectively contribute to the teaching of these elements associated with spatial thinking. The National Atlas of Korea is chosen for lesson plan development because it is well-designed and provides a range of contents and comprehensiveness that are ideal; in addition, it is freely accessible online and downloadable (http://nationalatlas.ngii.go.kr/). Four master geography teachers were invited to examine the Atlas to conceive and develop Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) lesson plans. Four lesson plans were written and have continually been implemented in classrooms to over 800 students in the States of Utah, Georgia, Minnesota, and Tennessee since the 2015 Fall semester. Results are presented in this paper.

Teaching Spatial Thinking With The National Atlas of Korea: A Valuable Resource for Advanced Placement Human Geography

The second edition of The National Atlas of Korea (Choe 2015), published in December 2014 by the National Geographic Information Institute (NGII) of South Korea (the Republic of Korea) in both Kore...

Recent Trends in Geography Education in Louisiana

Geography at elementary and middle schools in Louisiana, USA., remains a social studies strand along with civics, economics, and history, with no state-required geography course at any level. But because schools may require more geography than the state standard, this research examines the extent to which K–12 students are exposed to geography in Louisiana, using an electronic survey and an interview with state department of education officials. Results suggest that geography remains underemphasized, but the 2011 implementation of new social studies standards, the Advanced Placement Human Geography course, and other initiatives offer promise for more geographically literate Louisiana citizens.

Bridging GIS Success

.This article shares the first-time geographic information system (GIS) experiences of two advanced placement human geography classes. The teacher had participated in a summer GIS workshop and then brought those skills into her classroom for the students' benefit. Eighteen students shared their experiences researching their family history, working to map the migration of their genealogy to the United States, and presenting their findings to their classmates. Researchers were on hand to observe presentations and collected survey data from the students. Overall it was a very successful educational experience in which students utilized a “new” technology in the context of their own lives.

Perspectives on the Development and Future of Advanced Placement® Human Geography

Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography faced a number of hurdles that nearly derailed the course before it launched in 2000–2001. A dedicated cadre of geography professionals and high school teachers rose to the challenge and the course remains one of the fastest growing AP courses currently offered by College Board. Seventeen readers and leaders scored 3,272 exams in 2001. The numbers increased dramatically to 160,013 exams scored by 597 readers in 2015. This article briefly discusses the early challenges, and considers three long-term goals.

Placing Advanced Placement® Human Geography: Its Role in U.S. Geography Education

ABSTRACTThis article examines Advanced Placement Human Geography (AP HG) in the context of its place in efforts to reform geography education. It presents a critical analysis of the AP program and its curriculum, asserting that it represents “powerful knowledge” as conceptualized by Young. It concludes with a call for research in AP HG aligned with recommendations to focus geography education research. Geographers in higher education are encouraged to embrace AP HG as a mechanism to recruit students and majors.

Connecting high school and university teachers in national and international contexts: perspectives from the 2012 Bangalore workshop of the AAG-CGGE

This paper focuses on the Center for Global Geography Education teaching workshop held in Bangalore, India, in March 2012 which served as a collaborative forum linking geography teachers in secondary and higher education in the USA and India. It considers the inclusion of the Advanced Placement Human Geography teachers from the USA and the building of global teaching content in collaborative teams as a useful way to connect geography teachers across institutional contexts. Based on a survey of workshop participants, it also highlights some of the issues that need to be addressed for further strengthening of high school–university linkages within national and across international contexts.

Advanced Placement Human Geography and the Annual Meetings of the National Council for Geographic Education

Members of the National Council for Geographic Education have been instrumental in the creation, launch, and early success of Advanced Placement Human Geography. Annual meetings of the Council have served as a forum for spreading the word about the course and its follow-up national examination and in helping teachers develop content confidence and delivery strategies. This article tracks, via the Council's 1996–2005 annual meeting programs, agenda time devoted over that ten-year period to this Advanced Placement course, focusing on total minutes by year, minutes by category, and the people presenting.

What Kind of Assessment for What Kind of Geography? Advanced Placement Human Geography*

This article raises awareness of the recently introduced Advanced Placement course in Human Geography by describing the design and management of assessment in the course. Standards are maintained through the choice of assessment instrument, the development of test items, scoring, and grade-setting. The article contributes to a deeper understanding of the opportunities and threats of standardized testing within geography.