Help Our Kids Click Their Way To A 3, 4, Or 5 On The AP Exam

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My Students

In order to improve our AP success rate, our school has been combining the AP Government and AP Macroeconomics classes into a single requirement. Our kids come from low socio-economic backgrounds, and our school lacks many of the basic 21st-century resources most of the local private schools have.

Bright and eager learners abound in our AP classes.

Most take 4 or more of them their senior year, in order to improve their chances to attend a good college. Even without Internet access or even a computer at home, our kids compete with the rest of the district for top honors year in and year out, magnet schools included. My co-teacher and I work as a collaborative team, swapping our kids daily to improve the likelihood that they will remember more of the required material they will need to pass our respective AP exams in May. We spend many hours tutoring in larger spaces that can accommodate our 120 kids, so it's sometimes hard for them to hear us over the constant humming noise of the A/C units. So these portable voice boosters will greatly enhance our ability to reach out and be heard by all of our students, as they engage fully in the material. Using the answer pads will also allow us to continually check for understanding without having to take time out for paper quizzes.

My Project

Our goal is to spend at least 1/3 of the time informally assessing our students' ability to master the content being presented to them, and instantly reevaluate the lesson if needed. By using the answer pads, we can not only check for student understanding, we can engage them in authentic learning my constantly presenting them with the same type of multiple-choice questions and open-ended scenarios they will have to face to pass the AP exams. As a bonus, grading (and therefore feedback) is almost instantaneous, allowing the students to make valuable connections to the lesson right away, instead of having to wait days to be handed back their graded assignments. Clearly, having the ability to provide immediate and constant feedback is extremely valuable. So is the extra time being freed by not having to grade, sort, and return the paper assessments. That valuable time can now be spent improving our lessons, to better respond to the data collected with the answer pad system.

Our goal this year is to improve our students' overall performance on the AP Government and AP Macroeconomic exams by at least 15 percent.

In order to reach our target, my co-teacher and I have spend countless hours over the summer pouring over our respective curricula to target the areas needing improvements. One of the glaring shortcomings is the lack of funding for classroom engagement materials such as tablet computers or wireless answer pads. This project directly addresses this problem.