High school students enroll in Advanced Placement (AP) courses and take AP exams for a variety of reasons. However, a lack of information about the extent to which there are incremental benefits associated with taking multiple AP exams has fostered a perception that students must take many APs to be prepared for college. Conversely, many American students graduate from high school without even one AP, raising questions about whether such experiences should have been more strongly encouraged. Our article investigates the incremental gains in college student outcomes that are associated with taking and performing well on numerous AP exams. Using postsecondary transcript records, we examine the relationships between college outcomes (first-year grades and bachelor's degree attainment) and AP (number of AP exams taken and number of AP exams with passing scores of 3 or higher). After controlling for achievement, demographic characteristics, and other factors, we find that the biggest predicted boost in first-year grades and on-time bachelor's degree attainment are associated with AP participation changing from zero to one AP exam and from one to two AP exams. Taking and performing well on more than four to six AP exams does not markedly alter predicted first-year college grades and on-time bachelor's degree attainment rates.
Students who struggle in pursuit of postsecondary education tend to be Latino, Black, low-income, or first-generation college students. This article presents the case of a small public school serving students grades 6-12 from these traditionally underrepresented backgrounds in a large urban school district. Observations revealed that the school works to accomplish its primary mission of preparing students for college by merging academics with the socioemotional development of students. The relationships between and among students and staff in the school are the foundation upon which the school's college-going culture is built. The study concludes with recommendations for ways to build a college-going culture in similar schools.
Ithaka S+R's Teaching Support Services Program investigates the teaching practices and support needs of collegiate instructors. Our most recent project in this program, "Supporting Teaching with Primary Sources," focused on identifying how to effectively support instructors and their students find, access, and use primary sources in classroom environments.Encounters with primary sources-historical or contemporary artifacts that bear direct witness to a specific period or event-are central to the pedagogy of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Their use in undergraduate instruction aligns with universities' commitments to experiential and inquiry-based learning and library initiatives focused on media and information literacy. Reflecting the importance of the topic within higher education, "Supporting Teaching with Primary Sources" attracted the largest cohort of any Ithaka S+R program to date. Research teams at 26 academic libraries in the United States and United Kingdom joined the program. ProQuest, which sponsored the project, conducted interviews with instructors at an additional 16 universities. Together, the 27 research teams interviewed 335 instructors, asking detailed questions about how instructors design courses and assignments utilizing primary sources, and where and how instructors and their students discover and access primary sources appropriate for classroom use.These transcripts yielded rich data about how stakeholders-including university libraries, faculty, administrators, publishers, and professional organizations-can best support undergraduate instruction using primary sources. Detailed findings and actionable recommendations can be found in the body of this report. Our findings and recommendations are grouped around the following important challenges and emerging best practices: ▪ Identifying appropriate primary sources. While digitization has made a wide variety of primary sources available to instructors, discovery tools are rarely optimized to make it easy for instructors to locate resources appropriate for classroom use.▪ Students' skills at discovering and evaluating primary sources. Students often lack familiarity with relevant search tools and strategies to discover sources and struggle to evaluate the value of the sources they do find. Maximizing student learning requires instruction in both the technical knowledge of discovery and information literacy.▪ Integrating primary sources requires careful course design. Effective pedagogy often involves scaffolding exposure to primary sources both within courses and across curricula, but many instructors default towards proscribing which sources students use, especially in large introductory classes.▪ Students benefit from exposure to both physical and digital sources. Physical encounters with material sources are highly-valued by instructors for inspiring student curiosity, but digital sources expand student access and the depth of library collections.▪ Collaboration pays dividends. Teaching effect...
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