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Updates to Advanced Placement Course Frameworks

June 28, 2022December 11, 2017

The College Board recently updated the course frameworks for several of the Advanced Placement courses for which Learning List has reviewed materials. We have worked with the College Board to revise our alignment templates to reflect the following changes:

AP History Disciplinary Practices and Reasoning Skills

The Historical Thinking Skills were reorganized and renamed “AP History Disciplinary Practices and Reasoning Skills.” The number of practices and skills were reduced. There are now two practices and four skills. “Periodization” and “Synthesis” were eliminated as separate skills.
The revised “AP History Disciplinary Practices and Reasoning Skills” are part of the frameworks for AP US History, AP World History, and AP European History. [Read more…]
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Frequently Asked Questions About Learning List

August 14, 2022November 19, 2017

As the school year shifts into high gear, we are getting a lot of questions about our service. Here are answers to the most frequently asked questions.

What is Learning List?
Learning List is a subscription-based instructional materials review service designed to help improve student learning by empowering educators to chooseand use instructional materials most effectively.

We created Learning List in 2013 to help districts become better informed consumers of instructional materials. Initially, districts used our reviews to facilitate their selection of materials. Over time, subscribers began telling us that our reviews also helped them identify the best parts of their existing materials to use to teach each standard. As one instructional coach explained, “We use your alignment reports as a GPS through our materials to ensure that we’re using the pages that teach each standard fully.”

What types of materials do you review?
We have reviewed over 2500 of the most widely used instructional materials, including:

Materials in the four core subjects, 12 Advanced Placement courses, Tech Apps and 85 CTE courses;

Comprehensive and supplemental materials, including RtI, testprep, criterion-referenced test banks, and professional development resources;

Publisher produced and free open educational resources (OERs);

State-adopted and non-adopted materials (i.e., materials that were not submitted for state adoption); and

English and Spanish versions of materials.

Subscribing districts get access to all published reviews and may request reviews of additional materials as part of the subscription. That’s why Learning List is a service, not just a website. [Read more…]

Rural Districts and Advanced Placement Courses

September 4, 2017

An August 2017 report from the Education Commission of the States and the College Board explores rural students’ access to and participation in Advanced Placement (AP) courses, as well as their performance on AP exams, relative to students who reside in urban and suburban areas. Below we summarize some key findings from the report, which relies on data collected across 15 school years (i.e., 2000-01 to 2014-15):

Access to AP courses has increased significantly for rural students. In 2001, only 56% of rural high school seniors had access to at least one AP course; by 2015, this percentage had increased to 73% of high school seniors.
While access to AP courses improved for rural students (73%), it still lagged that of urban (92%) and suburban (95%) students in 2015.
Of the rural high school seniors who had access to at least one AP course in 2015, only 31% took an AP exam. This compares with 40% of urban and 39% of suburban high school seniors.
On average, rural students earned an AP exam score of 2.6, compared with 2.73 for urban students and 2.98 for suburban students in 2015. Note that AP exams use a standardized score that ranges from 1 to 5, with a score of 5 indicating the highest level of performance. Scores of 3 or higher are often awarded college credit by post-secondary institutions. [Read more…]

“Bundling” Citations to Achieve Alignment

August 14, 2017

Do your teachers ever tell you that the material you have just purchased is not aligned to the standards? If so, breathe deeply and read on…

At Learning List, we have learned the scope of the citations listed in the publisher’s correlation can be determinative of whether a material is aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) or Advanced Placement (AP) standards.

What do we mean? Some publishers’ correlations consist of citations that cover one or two pages. Those citations are “narrow” in scope. Other publishers’ citations are broad in scope, consisting of a range of pages, a whole Book module, a chapter, or a 15-minute video. Both types of citations have their merits; broader citations are most likely to incorporate all of the knowledge and skills dense standards require; narrow citations can be useful instructionally, because they pinpoint more precisely where certain content or a skill is addressed in the text. [Read More …]

New Review: Wiley Publishing’s AP Calculus, 11th Edition

June 28, 2022October 27, 2016

Learning List has reviewed Wiley Publishing’s Calculus, 11th Edition. This comprehensive calculus product supports instruction in Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus AB and AP Calculus BC courses. Resources are available in print and eBook formats and additional online instructional materials are available from Wiley…

Why College Board is Redesigning the AP Course Frameworks

June 28, 2022August 15, 2016

In case you missed the announcement at the APAC conference last month, Learning List and the College Board have partnered to provide detailed, independent reviews of Advanced Placement (AP) materials. For each material, Learning List provides three independent reviews, including a detailed review of the material’s alignment to the Learning Objectives and Skills/Practices in the course framework. The College Board …

Advanced Placement Fun Facts

July 14, 2016

Fun facts about Advanced Placement.