It is the middle of summer. Temperatures are in the 90s and 100s. And here I am writing about my AP Statistics course.
This fall, I will embark on my third year teaching AP Statistics. I have not been generally pleased with the learning of my students in the first two years. A very low percentage of my students have passed the AP exam. I do not blame myself too much for these scores. My students thus far have not been terribly dedicated to this course. Senioritis interferes significantly.
But, there were some students that I think worked hard enough to get a three on the exam and fell short. I do think I provided ample opportunity for these students to succeed. I believe they had meaningful learning experiences that could have prepared them well for the exam.
I want better for them. I want to improve my course. Not just to improve AP scores. But to up the interest in the material and the course. I believe if students find the course more interesting, their learning will improve. I also want to make the material easier to access.
My first move is to start the year off with data gathering unit that will culminate in a questionnaire project. Working in pairs, students will design a questionnaire to gather data on an issue of their choice (such as abortion, immigration controls, the legalization of marijuana, etc.). The questionnaires will be distributed to the students and teachers at our school and the data we collect will be used throughout the year.
My second move is to increase the number of projects. Last year, there were four projects. The other main assessment I used was free response questions. So, this year, I am hoping to do six projects and reduce the number of free response questions.
I have been teaching a non-AP statistics course for many years now. That course has always been project-based. So, I have plenty of experience from which to draw. I am hopeful that project work will lead to deeper understanding.
Of course, today, one of our administrators wrote in an email to me that she hopes AP classes will be gone from our school in one or two years. That was a bit demotivating, but I owe it to my students to make the course better. Hopefully, that will be motivation enough.
"Of course, today, one of our administrators wrote in an email to me that she hopes AP classes will be gone from our school in one or two years. "
ReplyDeleteWhoa. Why?
One thought is that we can offer high quality courses without the constraints of the AP.
DeleteI teach at a private school and we have around 140 teaching days to get students ready for AP exams. That's a serious time crunch to cover all of the AP Statistics content.
At our school, students get a full grade bump in their GPA for taking an AP course. A concern is that many students take the course for the grade bump.
There may be other reasons. I haven't talked with her about it yet.
I have to agree with Dan... Why does your admin want AP to go away?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I would caution against reducing the number of FR questions you use. My results weren't as high as I had hoped and my FR is definitely something that I reduced this year and it showed up in my results :(
Well, I gave them 27 Free Response Questions that I counted towards their grade and another 6 or so that didn't count. So, my idea is to add two projects and reduce the number of FRQs by 6 or so.
DeleteAlso, my hope is that the projects work out like extended FRQs. My expectation will be that they will use many of the same tools and reasoning and writing that they have to use on FRQs.
I want to encourage you as you work on your course! I have taught AP stats for 12 years now, and am still working to get better.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I would encourage is to not give up on free response. But do make them more purposeful. One of the main goals of the course, of not THE main goal of the course, is COMMUNICATING STATISTICS EFFECTIVELY. I use free response AP problems. I have the students do the problem, then explore responses to see what good communication looks like (if you have a document camera, this is a great use of it), and then see the rubric the readers used to grade the question. What you find invariably is that the tenets of good statistical communication are what receive credit.
As for scores on the AP exam, this process helps improve them, although that is just a side benefit. The best thing we can do to prepare our students for the AP exam is to help students to communicate statistics effectively!
Feel free to follow me (@callmejosters), and others like Doug Tyson (@tyson.doug), Amy Hogan (@alittlestats), Bob Lochel (@bobloch) and others. Stats is a small but VERY supportive community!
Thank you for the encouragement and support.
DeleteI am not going to give up on FRQs. I just want to give students more open-ended project work. I already have a lot (maybe too many) assessments. So, if I am going to add two projects, I need to cut down on the number of FRQs. Last year, I gave a lot of unit tests that were made up of three FRQs. So my thought is to end two of the units with a project instead of a test.
I agree that communication is huge in AP Statistics. I think this can be developed a lot in project work.
Thanks for the Twitter suggestions. I like using Twitter for dialogue like this. It's an easy way to get some professional development.