Attleboro's Advanced Placement – Social Studies

Today I want to continue my series on Attleboro’s Advanced Placement program.  So far in this series I provided an overview of the Advanced Placement program, explaining how a success is measured by both the state educational agency and the organization that administers and monitors the advanced placement program in the nation, and provided a summary of the English Language Arts courses with a focus on trending of the percentage of passing and failing as we have continuously increased student participation. 

Here are the links to those articles:

http://attleboro.patch.com/blog_posts/attleboros-advanced-placement-over...

http://attleboro.patch.com/blog_posts/attelboros-advanced-placement-ela

So today I want to stay on the positive side of the discussion and focus on another area where Attleboro has done very well, the Social Studies courses.  Now unlike the ELA courses the Social Studies offerings have changed over the years.  Back in 2010 there was only one course offered, US History.  In 2011 the offerings were increased to include US History, World History and European History.  And then in 2012 the European History course was removed. 

So let’s start with the one course that has been available all along, US History.  Here are the final national exam results for the past three years:

US HISTORY

US History

5

4

3

2

1

% Pass

% Fail

Total

2012

5

6

1

1

1

85.7

14.3

14

2011

3

9

6

0

0

100.0

0.0

18

2010

11

9

10

2

0

93.8

6.3

32

Now here are some great results!  In our first year we had 32 students, with 11 of them receiving the highest score of 5 (equivalent of an A) and 9 receiving a score of 4 (equivalent of a B).  With almost 94% passing I definitely like the idea of expanding this program in year 2.  But in 2011 we actually cut back on the number of students, though that was likely due to the addition of both World History and European History.  One great point was that after dropping down to 18 students (from 32) 100% received a passing grade on the final national exam.  And then in 2012 the number of students was again dropped, slightly, to 14.  We had almost 86% pass the final exam this year, although one student did receive a failing grade of 1 (equivalent of an F).

The one concerning area to me is how something that started off so positive was actually reduced.  Why go from 32 students (with almost 94% passing and no scores of 1) to 18 students?  As explained above this might have been caused by the addition of both World History and European History, so let’s take a look at these now…

WORLD HISTORY

World History

5

4

3

2

1

% Pass

% Fail

Total

2012

6

7

26

6

0

86.7

13.3

45

2011

2

8

12

11

4

59.5

40.5

37

So World History started in 2011 and we maintained it in 2012.  In our first year the results were, well, dreadful.  We had less than 60% receiving a passing final national exam score.  What I find interesting is how in 2012 the number of students was increased (which normally leads to an increase in failures) with a total turnaround of results.  Now we had over 85% receiving a passing final national exam score and no students receiving a failing score of 1.  The obvious fair question is why?

Now I can see how it might take a year for a teacher who has taken on a new AP course to get a full understanding of the course expectations and what needs to be covered, which could account for this.  But at the same time I think this shows how starting slow (meaning with less students in year 1 and slowly increasing) in such rigorous courses is probably for the best.  Would over 40% have failed in 2011 if there were only say 20 students taking the course?  But looking at the positive side of things we now have almost 87% receiving a passing grade on the national final exam, which should be heralded.  We should want to take steps to prevent these percentages from dropping, especially since we have 45 students in the course already, but again, this is a major positive!

So next we have European History, which we only had for the one year:

EUROPEAN HISTORY

European History

5

4

3

2

1

% Pass

% Fail

Total

2011

1

3

8

2

10

50.0

50.0

24

So looking at the results I can kind of see why the decision was made to do away with the course.  With 50% of the students receiving a failing score and worse, almost 42% of the students failing with a final national exam score of 1, something was way off on this one.  Still, 13 students did well and if you look at what happened with World History it makes me wonder what would have happened if we had maintained the course for another year, while not pushing more students into it and/or utilizing some form of gate-keeping, meaning having pre-requisites to be able to establish that a student is ready to take on the rigor of this course.  Since World History went from 37 students and over 40% failing, to 45 students and only 13.3% failing; could we have done the same with European History?

Of course there are many factors that go into these decisions, including things like losing staff members and such.  And since I am not privy to that information I will not try to make assumptions.  But the question is fair, I think...

SUMMARY

So again, I think the Social Studies offerings are a bright star in this whole advanced placement program, but there are definitely some things that can be taken away…

First, we started back in 2010 with one course and 32 students.  And with that limited focus we did absolutely amazing!  In 2011 we expanded the Social Studies program, possibly too much at one time.  By adding two new courses in the same subject area in the same year we ended up adding 47 students (a 157% increase) but watered down what had already proven itself to be working.  This increase led to some major issues, with 27 failures (as compared to 2 the previous year), which equated to almost 60% of the students that year.  It appears this also led to the need to do away with one of the offerings in an attempt to “right the ship”. 

The number of students taking AP Social Studies dropped last year from 79 to 59, but the ship has indeed been righted!  We now sit right where we should be, minimally, with over 85% passing and only 1 failing score of 1.  At the same time this past year we only had 14 US History students, and only 18 the year before, as compared to 32 in our first year.  Now remembering how well we did in this subject in the first year I can’t help wonder why we’ve stayed so low in participation these past two years.  Maybe we overloaded in year 1 so the participation had to drop in the next couple of years, but this definitely seems like an appropriate place to add participation (as long as we can maintain the positives).

Looking at the overall state results it seems like the Social Studies AP courses are higher, as compared to most of the other course offerings.  Not sure why that might be and there of course might be many different factors that could account for this, but I think the point here is that this is one area where we would want to ensure the positives, as well as have higher expectations, while looking to push ourselves.  Maybe it is time to bring back that European History course, as long as we don’t try to go too far (meaning keeping the class sizes down and to students who have proven themselves ready for the college level rigor).  Maybe we want to promote that US History course more, as long as we take steps to maintain the high results (meaning keeping participation to the students who have proven themselves ready for the college level rigor).  Now I may not agree with all of the decisions that have been made in order to get where we are in this area, but overall the main point here is that Attleboro’s AP Social Studies is a very bright star in Attleboro's advanced placement program!