Over the past 20 years, the College Board has expanded its Advanced Placement program to consist of over 30 courses offered to millions of students throughout the United States. While more students are enrolling in AP courses, the percentage of students passing the exams has declined. With students enrolling in the Advanced Placement courses as…

Supporting the reading comprehension and content knowledge acquisition of English language learners (ELs) requires instructional practices that continue beyond developing the foundational skills of reading. In particular, the challenges ELs face highlight the importance of teaching reading comprehension practices in the middle grades through…

The College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) Program continues to expand annually with increased numbers of high school students nationwide enrolling in AP courses and taking end-of-course AP exams, in hopes of earning college credit and strengthening high school transcripts. As the College Board promotes increased minority student participation…

Assessing students' historical understanding has been a long-standing challenge in history education. One of the widely used tools for accomplishing this task is the large-scale standardized test, the results of which are used as an indicator of student knowledge and skills in the social sciences/history. At the national level, the National…

The AP Achievement Institute I (APAI I) is a four-day professional development program offered to teachers and administrators by EXCELerator™, a district reform program operated by the College Board. The APAI I program is designed to help teachers develop effective AP instructional strategies for a diverse student body and to help district,…

The purpose of this presentation was to interpret the results of two large-scale assessments of textbook usage in light of criticism that textbooks are ineffective teaching/learning tools. One assessment occurred as a follow-up to a Schools and Staffing Survey involving 3,994 classroom teachers, who were asked about their classroom practices in…

The purpose of the research reported in this paper was to develop a preliminary factorial structure of high school history teachers' perceptions on the most important elements of successful history teaching. The 54-item Teaching American History Perception and Behavior Questionnaire was developed and administered to high school American history…

In a study investigating the effects of student engagement in inquiry learning through the development of Web sites, nearly every student reported having enjoyed the project, and the majority scored an A or B for their project grade. However, neither enjoyment nor high achievement on this performance task necessarily translated into high scores on…

The purpose of this study was to compare the use of WebQuests with traditional instruction. Specifically, the study examined the end-of-unit exam scores for students who completed a WebQuest on the Texas Revolution and those students completing a poster activity. Both of the instructional activities were implemented as additional enhancement to…