Each year, many students take the Advanced Placement (AP) Music Theory Exam, and the majority of these students enroll in specialized AP music theory classes as part of the preparation process. For the teachers of these AP music theory classes, a number of challenges are presented by the difficulty and complexity of the exam subject material as…

When projects are the spine of a course, they are systematically sequenced one after the other, and they do the heavy lifting of the course. They teach its core content and skills. The author has been testing this model of course design for several years, aiming for experiential learning that is tied to deep rather than superficial learning of…

This annual report highlights information on school performance and improvement in Hawaii's public schools. The report profiles academic events, trends, and outcomes. Featured are tables and figures related to demographic, financial, and educational performance. Also, comparisons to other states with relevant characteristics similar to Hawaii are…

This report presents Advanced Placement (AP) examination participation and performance results in Texas and the United States for the 2018-19 school year. The results are for public and nonpublic schools combined and are presented by race/ethnicity and gender. [For "Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate Examination Results in…

Early colleges are intended to serve students from populations typically underrepresented in college and to prepare those students with the academic skills and dispositions to succeed in college. Another important attribute of early colleges is that they help students earn college credit during their high school years. Many such early colleges are…

AP Human Geography students need to develop an understanding of what it means to examine the world around them from a geographic perspective. Focusing attention on geography's concern with spatial relationships, place characteristics, and geographic context helps student appreciate the nature of the discipline and the insights it offers. These…

While preparing her Year 12 students for an International Baccalaureate paper on early Islam, Kirstie Murray became concerned that students' weaknesses in making claims would be particularly exposed by the challenging complexity of this topic's source record and its contested historiography. Drawing on the practice of other history teachers,…

This data book profiles noteworthy academic events, trends and outcomes at the state and complex-area level. It includes tables, figures and narrative sections related to demographic, financial and educational performance. A list of references and resources is provided. [For "Hawaii Department of Education Data Book, 2021. 32nd Annual…

Two trends have remade the field of political geography over the past quarter-century. First, a revision of taken-for-granted concepts that amounted to "spatial determinism." Second, pioneering many new and emerging concepts such as political ecology. Both trends are important contributions to the evolving section of the AP Human…

With more than 3 million participants per year, the Advanced Placement (AP) program is one of the most popular programs in the United States for exposing high-achieving high school students to advanced academic content. Sponsored by the College Board, the AP program provides a framework in which high school teachers can teach introductory…

Advanced coursework is one strategy education leaders and policymakers have used to improve academic performance and college readiness (Iatarola et al., 2011). Programs such as Advanced Placement (AP) and dual enrollment provide students opportunities to earn college credit while in high school. Proponents of advanced coursework argue that…

Students learning the skills of science benefit from opportunities to move between the scientific problems and questions they confront and the mathematical tools available to answer the questions and solve the problems. Indeed, students learn science best when they are actively engaged in pursuing answers to authentic and relevant questions. We…

This article examines a particular type of public-private partnership (PPP) that is rarely studied in comparative educational policy studies: one in which a government funds privately run international schools. The aim of this PPP is to enrich and thereby improve the regular curriculum or to the quality of education in "public schools."…

Little research has been done on key concepts related to peer feedback, including whether learners are able to transfer skills learned to future related tasks or to other classes and content areas, and whether the gains observed through peer feedback are the result of "giving" peer feedback or of "receiving" peer feedback. The…

We delineate some types of structured practice (modeling, requests, feedback, and space-making) that help students learn to pose appropriate questions and to initiate exploration of those questions. Developing skills requires practice, so we suggest ways to embed structured practice into existing class sessions. Including structured practice is…