Having celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2005, the Advanced Placement (AP) program has received quite a bit of attention in the past few years due mainly to its exponential growth in popularity. While much of this attention has been positive, a significant amount of criticism has attacked the assumptions of the AP program, aligning it with…

In 2000, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty first proposed putting the course materials from all 1,800 MIT classes online, free of charge. The idea behind MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) was to use the Internet for more than just distance learning. When MIT began placing the course materials online in 2002 and 2003, the audience…

This study focused on the relationship between students' Advanced Placement Program[R] (AP[R]) performance in AP English Language, Biology, Calculus, and U.S. History, and their subsequent college success. For each AP Exam studied, students were divided into three groups according to their AP Exam performance (no AP Exam taken, score of 1 or 2,…

Against the backdrop of today's increasingly multicultural society, are America's elite colleges admitting and successfully educating a diverse student body? "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal" pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive look at how race and social class impact each stage--from…

In classrooms around the country, AP (Advanced Placement) teachers are preparing students for tomorrow by teaching them how to think and learn today. AP students learn to construct solid arguments, test theories, and see many sides of an issue--the kind of thinking that solves tough problems both in and outside the classroom, in college and…

Published in partnership with WestEd, this significantly updated second edition of the bestselling book contains strategies for helping students in middle school through community college gain the reading independence to master subject area textbooks and other material. Features of this book include: (1) Based on the Reading Apprenticeship…

This study examines nine voluntary working relationships or partnerships between tribal education departments (TEDs) and local education agencies supporting American Indian students. Individual profiles describe how each partnership works, focusing primarily on collaborative activities intended to improve education outcomes for American Indian…

This article describes the use of limits in topics that are usually covered in a high school advanced placement chemistry course or a first-year college chemistry course. Such an approach supplements the interpretation of the graph of an equation since it is usually easier to evaluate the limit of a function than to generate its graph. In…

Each year, Austin Independent School District Department of Research and Evaluation (DRE) staff develop a plan of work to describe the scope of work for the coming year. The plans that make up this document identify programs to be evaluated and services to be provided by DRE staff and provide the blueprints for evaluation that staff will follow…

This study focused on the relationship between students' Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) performance in AP English Language, Biology, Calculus, and U.S. History, and their subsequent college success. For each AP Exam studied, students were divided into three groups according to their AP Exam performance (no AP Exam taken, score of 1 or 2, and a…

This article analyses intergroup differences in education, with particular emphasis on schools offering one or more of the International Baccalaureate programmes ("IB World schools"). Experiences of human difference are often interpreted in terms of culture, and the notion of intercultural understanding is valued in many international schools. Yet…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the following question: To what extent would a nationally competitive scholarship program increase science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) degree awards to our "best and brightest"? This inquiry is prompted by a 2006 report of a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel, "Rising Above the…

Throughout 2003-04 five cohorts of students in their final year of school studies in various Malaysian colleges and a group of students completing an Australian university foundation year in Malaysia sat the International Student Admissions Test (ISAT). The ISAT is a multiple-choice test of general academic abilities developed for students whose…

For years, only a handful of the highest achievers graduated from high school with college courses on their transcripts. However, as states strive to blur the line between high school graduation requirements and college expectations, such dual-enrollment courses are quickly becoming part of a broader strategy to help more students become…

The disparity in persistence between males and females studying physics has been a topic of concern to physics educators for decades. Overall, while female students perform as well as or better than male students, they continue to lag considerably in terms of persistence. The most significant drop in females studying physics occurs between high…