Board's Advanced Placement Research Articles

Gordon Keith Chalmers and the Politics of Advanced Placement

This article investigates the role of mid-century conservatism in shaping the College Board's Advanced Placement program. Kenyon president Gordon Keith Chalmers and superintendent of New Trier public schools William Cornog, who led the committee that directly gave rise to the AP Program, understood themselves as classically liberal but socially conservative, and their proposed program was rooted in principles associated with that movement. In keeping with other mid-century conservative thinkers, they promoted humanistic inquiry that introduced all American students, regardless of backgrounds, to the notion of individual freedom, in spaces set apart from economic activity. This article explains that Chalmers and Cornog agreed that schools should focus on reinforcing and transmitting a distinctly American heritage of constitutionalism, individualism, and universal morality by way of the liberal arts. The article ends by establishing how this ideological framing contradicts the Advanced Placement program's current shape.

Advance Placement and The Achievement Gap in the 21st Century: A Multiple Linear Regression of Marginalized Populations in AP Enrollment

The analysis of the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) enrollment focused on marginalized populations' (i.e., African American, Hispanic, and poor students) limited access and the schools' efforts to bridge the gaps. Little research has been done on marginalized populations' AP passage rates. The researchers of this correlational study investigated AP enrollment and passage rates in public and charter high schools in Florida (n = 355) by comparing the enrollment and passage proportions amongst Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic students as well as the proportions of students who received free or reduced lunch. The results showed a weak, positive relationship between proportions of Hispanic, African American, and Caucasian students passing AP exams and the proportion of AP students enrolled. There was a strong, positive relationship amongst the proportions of African-American, Hispanic, and Caucasian students who passed the exam. However, a weak, negative relationship was found between the proportions of students who were enrolled in AP classes and those who received free or reduced lunch. There was also a negative relationship between Hispanic, African American, and Caucasian students passing the AP exam and the percentage of the school's population enrolled in free or reduced lunch. The findings suggest that schools with high poverty rates have a low enrollment rate of students in AP courses. The focus on AP enrollment rates for minority students has led to increased rates of minorities successfully completing advanced coursework, but there is still a need for similar focus on high poverty schools.

Confronting the “Acid Test”: Educators’ Perspectives on Expanding Access to Advanced Placement at a Diverse Florida High School

This study examines educators’ perspectives on accountability mandates designed to expand access to the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) classes to traditionally underserved students at a diverse suburban high school in Florida, Palm Crest High School. Consistent with Elmore (1979), district and site-based administrators focused on the “forward mapping,” of implementation and identified teacher “gatekeeping” as well as parental expectations as chief barriers to opening up AP enrollment. Teachers, however, found implementation problematic—accountability levers had contradictory provisions and overall neglect nonacademic barriers to college access for low-income African American and Hispanic students. The current value-added model of incorporating student exam performance as a key component of teacher evaluations complicates the advocacy associated with increasing low-SES students’ participation in AP classes as educators strive to maintain high pass rates amid open-enrollment policies. We argue for increased support systems to enhance students’ preparedness for taking college-level courses while in high school, leading to increased college attendance and degree completion.

Classification Accuracy of Mixed Format Tests: A Bi-Factor Item Response Theory Approach.

Mixed format tests (e.g., a test consisting of multiple-choice [MC] items and constructed response [CR] items) have become increasingly popular. However, the latent structure of item pools consisting of the two formats is still equivocal. Moreover, the implications of this latent structure are unclear: For example, do constructed response items tap reasoning skills that cannot be assessed with multiple choice items? This study explored the dimensionality of mixed format tests by applying bi-factor models to 10 tests of various subjects from the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) Program and compared the accuracy of scores based on the bi-factor analysis with scores derived from a unidimensional analysis. More importantly, this study focused on a practical and important question—classification accuracy of the overall grade on a mixed format test. Our findings revealed that the degree of multidimensionality resulting from the mixed item format varied from subject to subject, depending on the disattenuated correlation between scores from MC and CR subtests. Moreover, remarkably small decrements in classification accuracy were found for the unidimensional analysis when the disattenuated correlations exceeded 0.90.

Conceptualizing a Framework for Advanced Placement Statistics Teaching Knowledge

The purpose of this article is to sketch a conceptualization of a framework for Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics Teaching Knowledge. Recent research continues to problematize the lack of knowledge and preparation among secondary level statistics teachers. The College Board's AP Statistics course continues to grow and gain popularity, but is a challenge for most secondary teachers to teach because of the emphasis on conceptual understanding and problem solving. Therefore, examining the components of teaching knowledge required for the course is of high importance. Using existing statistics teaching knowledge guidelines, previous research findings, national standards and College Board content requirements, a teaching knowledge framework for AP Statistics is proposed that will appropriately focus the teaching of AP Statistics courses to better prepare teachers and minimize current deficiencies.

The Polish Contribution to the Development of European Democracy: Interpretations in American Textbooks

Abstract Teaching about democracy, its ideas and genesis, which are ingrained in the tradition of Western civilization, constitutes one of the fundamental educational objectives in the United States. A commitment to the values and principles of democracy and to the Constitution, which establishes and protects fundamental rights and liberties, is a foundation of American society. Tracing the roots of democracy in ancient Athens, and in medieval English documents, such as the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215, high school and college textbooks usually discuss the development of democratic patterns of government in seventeenth-century England and Holland, and sometimes Switzerland. But what about the democracy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a unique political system that functioned during three centuries, from the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth? Does it belong to the Western tradition? How is Polish democracy, with all its developments, achievements, and imperfections, presented and perceived in contemporary American textbooks? The significance of these questions is closely related to the concept of the availability heuristic: the quality and quantity of provided information and its interpretation play a considerable role in creating and expressing opinions about Polish history and its contribution to the development of democracy. This article examines history textbooks used at three levels of education: basic high school, College Board Advanced Placement programs, and college undergraduate. The basic high school level includes World History or World Civilization courses; Advanced Placement programs offer courses in Advanced Placement (AP) World History and AP European History; and finally, the college undergraduate level recommends a course in Western Civilization. While the goal of the basic high school courses, taught to freshman or sophomore classes, is to present global history in a rather concise way, the College Board AP courses discuss problems in much a broader historical and cultural context. Especially important is the AP European History course, which covers modern European history from the High Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the time that Polish democracy began to develop. According to the course description, "the AP European History course corresponds to the most recent developments in history curricula at the undergraduate level"; and it covers "questions in cultural, diplomatic, economic, intellectual, political, and social history." Although it concentrates on Western Europe, AP European History has been enlarged to encompass areas of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland.

The Accounting Pilot and Bridge Project

ABSTRACT The accounting profession will experience a 50 percent decline in its ranks in the next ten years as accounting professionals from the Baby Boomer generation retire. To replace these professionals, the accounting profession will have to compete with law, medicine, engineering, and other professions that will also be replacing their “boomers.” During the period the boomers are retiring, the number of high school graduates is expected to decline, which suggests that the currently high accounting enrollments are unlikely to continue. If the accounting profession is to compete for the best and brightest students in the future, it is in its best interest to address structural impediments that exist in its educational supply chain. One significant structural impediment in the supply chain is the traditional high school accounting course. In 2000 the AICPA's Taylor Report stated high school accounting courses were a “systemic barrier” to entry into the profession for the very high school students the profession wants to attract (Taylor 2000). These courses have not changed substantially since the Taylor report was issued. The Accounting Pilot and Bridge Project (The Project) proposes to eliminate this barrier and has created a new college-level high school accounting course that provides college credit for those students who take the course and pass a rigorous qualifying examination. The Project is modeled after the College Board's highly successful Advanced Placement (AP) program. Once specific goals are achieved, The Project plans to submit a proposal to the College Board for it to adopt accounting as part of its Advanced Placement curriculum. After describing the research and initiatives that led to the creation of The Project, this paper discusses the goals of The Project, the process to have accounting added to the College Board's AP Curriculum, the curriculum used in the pilot course, the progress made to date, and what lies ahead.

Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class Blogs

Students engaged in literary response on weblogs they wrote and maintained for an 11th‐grade English class. Three focal students, all members of a “regular” American Literature class in a school that is highly invested in The College Board's Advanced Placement program, forge hybrid social languages from the discourse of formal literary analysis and the discourse of digital writing. In doing so, they position themselves as “serious literature students” by employing tools of literary analysis modeled and expected by English teachers at this school, and as “web‐literate communicators” by playing with language in ways that would not ordinarily be sanctioned as appropriate in English classes. In addition, each student borrows from other intertextual social languages to read class texts in new and unsanctioned ways, sometimes consciously and unconsciously pushing against dominant school culture.

A Makeover for the Introductory Comparative Politics Course: Revising the College Board's Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) Course in Comparative Government and Politics

A college-level introductory course rarely gets the attention it deserves. It tends to be the oldest course in one's repertoire; the course that has the least-direct interface with one's research activities; the one that is most easily farmed out to adjunct faculty; and also the one that draws the largest audience, from all corners and crevices of the campus. It is easy to fall into a comfort zone with an introductory course, instead of thinking self-critically about one's method and effectiveness of instruction. Moreover, in a department setting, the introductory course is rarely the focus of our interaction with colleagues.

Issues and Options in Creating a National Assessment in World History

THE NATIONAL ASSESSMENT Governing Board (NAGB) is considering creating a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for world history education.' On the surface, a national assessment in world history appears to be a sensible and essentially unproblematic decision. NAGB already has assessments in United States History, Geography, Civics, and Economics (to be tested for the first time in 2006). As a school subject, world history in one form or another appears to be the fastest growing segment of the American school curriculum. Over the past twenty years almost every state has added world history related content to its curriculum at some grade level and in some form. Many require a course in world history for high school graduation. Perhaps the most dramatic indicator of world history's popularity has been the development and growth of the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) World History course. Tested for the first time in the spring of 2002, the AP World History exam drew the largest first time subscription in

Connecting Research to Teaching: Case Study: Advanced Placement Calculus in the Age of the Computer Algebra System

The widespread availability of such powerful software as computer algebra systems (CASs) marks the latest chapter in the ongoing story of technological evolution and its implications for mathematics education. The existence of CASs should force us to think carefully and reexamine ideas regarding curriculum and instruction (what and how we teach) and assessment of student learning (what and how we evaluate). We can gain some insight from considering the experience of the College Board's Advanced Placement Program. Advanced Placement (AP) calculus can serve as a case study of a program that has had to come to grips with a variety of CAS-related issues in curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Advanced Placement European History: An Anatomy of the Essay Examination, 1956-2000

THE COLLEGE BOARD's Advanced Placement European History examination, like the program it reflects, is akin to a living organism. It has evolved over the course of its first halfcentury of existence in virtually all respects: the types and subject matter of questions asked (and not asked); the nature of the history those questions reflect; the number of questions both offered and to be answered, as well as how they have been and not been grouped; the time allotted to answer those questions; the way questions have been worded in order to elicit thought-induced responses rather than those based on memorization of facts; and in its sensitivity to issues of class, gender, geography, ethnicity, and matters of faith.' This is perhaps the kind of evolution we all can agree on: a reflection of the mixture of change and continuity that characterizes both history itself and the evolution of the survey of European history course. This evolution also reflects how we as teachers and scholars evolve during the course of our careers, all in an effort, one hopes, to do a still better job, to get closer to ever-elusive perfection, to learn from our own history as we would hope our students have learned from the history we teach them. What follows is an examination of the exam, an anatomization of forty-five years of essay questions (540 such questions in all, with a high

The Aptitude-Achievement Function: An Aid for Allocating Educational Resources, with an Advanced Placement Example

We fit a functional relationship between aptitude and achievement test scores and show how to use it to allocate educational resources. As an example we use the PSAT–Mathematics test to predict performance on the College Board's Advanced Placement Test in calculus, as a guide to student and school participation, for school or system assessment, and to project future nationwide expansion. In addition to the PSAT-AP test score relations, we consider the distribution of student ability, school policies of student selection and recruitment, and teacher skill in presenting the material and in motivating students. This overall result provides an indication of just how remarkable was Jaime Escalante's accomplishment in Los Angeles's Garfield High School. We find little evidence for differences in educational quality between such diverse schools as in the inner city of Detroit and the affluent suburb of La Canada, California. We comment briefly on the role of the AP in international assessments.

Teaching Advanced Placement United States History in the Urban, Minority High School: Successful Strategies

DEWITT CLINTON HIGH SCHOOL in the Bronx, New York, is the quintessential urban secondary school-one hundred years old with virtually one hundred percent of its 4,500 students from minority backgrounds and eligible for Federal free lunch programs. Sharp intakes of breath followed by sympathetic clucking sounds usually ensue when my suburban neighbors learn that I teach there. Only the best informed of these know of the school's storied history and once magnificent reputation. Richard Rodgers, Neil Simon, James Baldwin, Paddy Chayevsky, Richard Avedon and Ralph Lauren are only a few of a litany of famous Americans among its graduates. Most simply assume that it is just another troubled and dangerous city school; one of those which fell prey to the financial crises, white flight, teachers' strikes, rising crime rates and immigration patterns of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Almost none are aware of the renaissance taking place at Clinton. It is a renaissance based on rising standards and rising expectations for both students and teachers. Much of the impetus for this thrust has come from the College Board's Advanced Placement program and its effort to open its programs to those traditionally underrepresented in college prep and AP courses. Taking advantage of Mellon Grants to attend College

Managing the Influence of DIF From Big Items: The 1988 Advanced Placement History Test as an Example

Building tests out of items that individually take a substantial amount of examinee time brings with it a number of problems. One major problem is that it is often too difficult and too expensive to extensively pretest such large items. Thus, the sorts of screening for flaws that are pro forma for multiple-choice items are not often done for large items. In addition, because there are so few large items on an operational test, not counting an entire item that is found to be flawed in an operational administration may be tantamount to aborting that administration. In this article, we examine the efficacy of the alternative of continuous item weighting. This alternative is illustrated on data from the 1988 administration of the College Board's Advanced Placement History Test.

MANAGING THE INFLUENCE OF DIF FROM BIG ITEMS: THE 1988 ADVANCED PLACEMENT HISTORY TEST AS AN EXAMPLE

ABSTRACTBuilding tests out of large items brings with it a number of problems. One major problem is that it is often too difficult and too expensive to extensively pretest large items. Thus the sorts of screening for flaws that are pro forma for multiple choice items is not often done for large items. In addition, since there are so few large items on an operational test, not counting an entire item that is found to be flawed in an operational administration may be tantamount to aborting that administration. In this paper we examine the efficacy of the alternative of continuous item weighting. This alternative is illustrated on data from the 1988 administration of the College Board's Advanced Placement History Test.

Gender-related differences on the College Board's Advanced Placement and Achievement tests, 1982–1992.

This study explored gender-related differences in participation in and scores on the College Board's Advanced Placement Program and Achievement examinations. In both sets of tests, the numbers of male and female high school students were unequal for several subject areas. The French, Spanish, and Modern Hebrew examinations attracted many more female than male students, whereas many more male than female students took the Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science examinations. There was little change in most of the patterns of enrollment from 1982 through 1992. Male students had moderately higher scores on the Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science tests, whereas female students had a slight advantage on some of the language examinations. Although the patterns of gender-related score differences were stable, there were some indications that gender differences are narrowing, especially in the areas of American history and computer science.

Gender-related differences on the College Board's Advanced Placement and Achievement tests, 1982-1992.

Gender-related differences on the College Board's Advanced Placement and Achievement tests, 1982-1992.

Comparing the Performance of High School and College Students on the Listening, Speaking, and Reading Sections of the Advanced Placement German Language Examination

Each year approximately 3,000 high school students take the College Board's Advanced Placement Examination in German Language. The examination is intended to measure a student's proficiency in listening, reading, writing, and speaking at an advanced college German language course level. Candidates receive grades from 5 (extremely well qualified) to 1 (no recommendation) which they present to colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Germany. Various institutions in the United States and Canada award credit or placement in German according to their Advanced Placement (AP) policies.1 British Universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have been accepting candidates based on AP Examination results for several years. Although the criteria vary from college to college, there is a general acknowledgment that the examination reflects competency.2 German universities will also admit American high school students to a course of study if they passed four AP examinations in the following subjects: 1. one foreign language and two mathematicalscientific subjects

On the Relative Value of Multiple‐Choice, Constructed Response, and Examinee‐Selected Items on Two Achievement Tests

Using analyses based on fitting item response models to data from the College Board's Advanced Placement exams in chemistry and United States history, we found that the constructed response portion of the tests yielded little information over and above that provided by the multiple‐choice sections. These tests also allow examinees to select subsets of the constructed response items; we found that scoring on the basis of the selections themselves provided almost as much information as did scoring on the basis of the answers