The International Baccalaureate (IB) has expanded in Latin America. Drawing from a larger multi-sited qualitative case study, we examined the challenges associated with the implementation of the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) in a Colombian and bilingual context. Findings highlight (1) the intersecting nature of challenges associated with the…

The Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program was developed to increase the number of secondary students who participate in rigorous academic courses, to accelerate student learning, and to improve student performance. The AVID program in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) targets students who (1) are in the academic…

This article explores student attitudes and perceptions relating to peer assessment, as observed at the International School of Lausanne, where the case study was restricted to students in the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Economics course of the programme. Informed by a review of literature on the relative merits of peer assessment,…

The purpose of the research was to compare student performance on Advanced Placement (AP) exams from 2009 to 2011 at Florida Virtual School and to explore student perceptions of their online course experience compared with the classroom-based AP experiences. The data indicated that students performed at levels comparable to the national sample but…

Ask a typical high school student to draw a picture of how a bar magnet works and most of the drawings produced will show a "+" and "-" sign at the two ends. Some students will write "N" and "S." If you then ask some follow-up questions, they will often resort to talking about "charges" being responsible for the magnetism. For several years, I…

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…

Students in the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) Class of 2016 continued to outperform students in the state of Maryland on Advanced Placement (AP) examinations based on AP results released by the Maryland State Department of Education and the College Board. The number and percentage of AP exam participation and performance for the State of…

The aim of this article is to present the International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme and briefly outline its core components, followed by a review of what authoritative reports identify as skills for the future, esteemed by universities and the job market. There is a striking match between these skills and IB outcomes; thus, DP graduates perform…

Teaching students to use news and information media ("information literacy") is an important aspect of civic education, especially now that news sources are rapidly changing and fragmenting along ideological lines. Information literacy is required in several state standards, and it is also frequently defined as an important "21st…

This paper considers why the International Baccalaureate--a prestigious international education program--is currently being incorporated into magnet schools in the United States. Since the mid-1980s, when school choice policy took root the number of magnet schools climbed and a growing number of them incorporated the International Baccalaureate…

The International Baccalaureate[R] (IB) examination system has grown exponentially in the United States from 268 schools involved in 1999 to 1,090 schools in 2009. The fact that 49,100 students of a total of 87,800 students in 122 countries were from U.S. schools in 2009 has posed problems in strategic planning, assessment and training, the…

Our study analyzes the impact of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, a college-preparatory educational program designed for higher-achieving students, on high school academic achievement in Chicago Public Schools. We exploit exogenous variation in the offering of the program across schools over time with a difference-in-differences…

In an effort to address severe budget deficits at both the state and local levels, schools and educational programs are being asked to trim budgets. The Advanced Placement Program is one program that will certainly be scrutinized. This article presents a general overview of AP social studies, a brief history of the AP social studies program, and…

The Advanced Placement (AP) program represents a critical element in Houston Independent School District's (HISD's) efforts to inject rigor into the high school classrooms. Since 2009, the AP course offerings in HISD have been vastly expanded, with more campuses offering a wider selection of AP courses that exposes a larger percentage of the high…

This article posits that world-class education is international education, as defined by UNESCO, and presents International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes as examples of this phenomenon. It begins with the IB's 1960s origins in international schools, which educated the children of globally mobile parents who worked principally in the UN and its…