Commentary pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Reflections on the Curriculum Framework Underpinning the Redesigned Advanced Placement Chemistry Course David J. Yaron* Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States ABSTRACT: The advanced placement (AP) chemistry course has recently undergone a major course redesign, as specified in a new curriculum framework. This commentary reflects on the community process used to author and review the curriculum framework, along with the intellectual framework of big ideas and science practices that guided the redesign. This contribution is part of a special issue on teaching introductory chemistry in the context of the advanced placement chemistry course redesign. KEYWORDS: High School/Introductory Chemistry, First-Year Undergraduate/General, Curriculum, Public Understanding/Outreach, Inquiry-Based/Discovery Learning, Testing/Assessment, Student-Centered Learning
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the course, with six “Big Ideas” of chemistry as the top level of the outline. • A Learning Science Panel worked, concurrently with the commission, to create a two-level outline of “Science Practices” (SPs) for use across the science domains. • A Review Panel then did an initial review of the course outline created by the Commission. (This is the stage at which I joined the process.) • A Curriculum Development and Assessment Committee (CDAC) was then convened to revise the concept outline and to embed learning objectives (LOs) that tie specific content to specific science practices. The result was a complete draft of the CF, which was then revised based on feedback from a higher-education panel (that provided feedback on the redesigned course as a whole, along with more detailed feedback on which topics are essential for inclusion in the AP course) and a panel of over 300 AP teachers (who gave feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the revised course). • The CDAC then morphed into the exam Development Committee (DC) to develop assessment items tied to specific LOs and to assemble these into forms that meet exam specifications regarding distribution across both the concept outline and the science practices. Throughout, the process was driven by representatives from both higher education and AP classrooms. The authoring committees (Commission, CDAC, and DC) had equal representation from secondary and higher education, and the review panels sought feedback from both communities.
INTRODUCTION The advanced placement (AP) program was launched in the early 1950s to help narrow a perceived widening in the gap between secondary and higher education.1 More than half a century later, AP continues to provide a means for secondary and higher education to work together to define what it means to know chemistry. In 2006, the College Board launched a redesign of the AP Biology, Chemistry, and Physics courses through a process that continues this collaborative tradition between high school and college educators. Since 2008, I have been working with a group of dedicated high school and college chemistry educators as part of this redesign effort. The redesigned course launched in the fall of 2103, with the first exams administered in the spring of 2014. At the core of the redesign is the curriculum framework (CF) that defines the learning objectives for the course.2 This paper is a reflection on the community process used to develop the CF, the intellectual framework of big ideas and science processes used to guide the development, and the ways in which I hope the CF can lead to a future of gradual community-driven change that keeps the course at the forefront of science education. My goal is to expose the processes and reasoning that influenced both the form and substance of the CF. The motivations for the redesign of the AP science courses, such as the report from the National Research Council,3 are discussed elsewhere in this issue.4 Here, I focus on two key drivers that had a strong influence on the CF. The first was a desire to strike a better balance between breadth of content coverage and depth of understanding. The second was a greater emphasis on science practices, namely, discipline-specific critical thinking, inquiry, reasoning, and communication skills.
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READING THE CURRICULUM FRAMEWORK The initial outcomes of the redesign are the Course and Exam Description, a practice exam, and the AP Chemistry exams administered in the spring of 2014.2 The discussion here will focus on the curriculum framework portion of the Course and Exam Description, which contains
COMMUNITY PROCESS Central to success of an endeavor of this magnitude is engaging a wide range of participants from both the secondary and higher education communities. The College Board used a series of committees to author the CF and associated materials along with review panels to provide feedback along the way. • A Commission launched the chemistry-specific aspects of the redesign by creating a three-level concept outline of © 2014 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Special Issue: Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry Published: July 28, 2014 1276
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• The concept outline, including 117 embedded learning objectives. • The science practices outline, used across all AP science domains. In reading the CF, it is useful to recognize both its purpose (communicating the scope of the course) and intended audience (chemistry instructors). The resulting level of detail differs substantially from a document intended for instruction. Compare for instance, essential knowledge 5.E.1 (involving qualitative reasoning around entropy) with 5.E.2 (involving thermodynamic favorability). Discussion of 5.E.1 is relatively concise because the scope of this topic can be conveyed to an instructor without inclusion of extensive detail. Discussion in 5.E.2 is much more detailed because it was necessary to precisely define how the term “thermodynamically favorable” is used in the CF. It is also useful to note that the LOs are meant to be viewed within the context of the CF. Each LO is a single sentence, with details being handled in the concept outline surrounding the LO. In considering the redesigned course, I join Gregory Rushton5 in encouraging instructors to go beyond consideration of the list of topics that are included and excluded. Because creating a superset of all college courses would run counter to promoting depth of understanding, a comparison of the topics in any individual college course with the topics of the CF is bound to reveal missing topics. However, the shifts being promoted through the redesign are not best viewed or evaluated in terms of a topic list, but rather in terms of the effects on students’ overall understanding of the big ideas and science practices of chemistry.
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The top level of the SP outline spans these: the representational (SP1) and mathematical (SP2) tools of science; the investigative components of questioning (SP3); experimental design (SP4) and data interpretation (SP5); and the integration of knowledge through explaining (SP6) and making connections (SP7). Decisions regarding course content were framed around the driving question, “What types of reasoning are required to engage in the practice of chemistry?” Modifications to Course Content
Selection of topics to remove or add to the course was a challenging aspect of the redesign. The authoring of the CF differs considerably from authoring a textbook. In writing a textbook, it is possible to include essentially all topics covered in all intro courses, because instructors can pick and choose from these topics. Such a superset approach to the AP course would lead to a course that is too broad to allow students to develop depth of understanding. Instead, a balance of breadth and depth was sought using the above driving questions to guide the decisions. Some specific examples follow. Colligative properties were eliminated because they are part of the prior knowledge required of courses leading up to AP. The content needed to go beyond this prior knowledge (e.g., solution normality versus molarity) were not viewed as essential for understanding the Big Ideas. The possibility of using colligative properties as example phenomena for supporting Big Ideas related to structure−property relationships or thermodynamics was explored. However, the complexities associated with applying molecular-level reasoning to these properties made these phenomena less-than-ideal choices. In some cases, subtopics were altered to shift instruction from aspects of topics that encourage shallow or algorithmic understanding to aspects of those topics that are more supportive of the Big Ideas. Electrochemistry has some examples of this. Attaching signs to the terminals of an electrochemical cell was eliminated, with the focus instead being on the direction of the flow of electrons and its relation to the chemical process occurring in the cell. Quantitative use of the Nernst equation was replaced with a qualitative understanding of how the concentrations in the cell influence the potential and the amount of current the cell is able to deliver. In atomic structure, content changes included both elimination of a long-standing topic and addition of a new type of experimental data. The assignment of quantum numbers to electrons in an atom was eliminated because it promotes instruction on a rote procedure that does little to deepen understanding of the Big Idea of periodicity. To promote deeper understanding of periodic trends in atomic structure, photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) was added.6 PES data reveal the energy of all electron shells in an atom, supporting practice with the shell model of the atom that goes beyond the easily memorized trends in ionization potential, electron affinity, electronegativity, and size of atoms. This ability of PES data to support practice that deepens understanding of periodicity was a primary driver for its inclusion. A secondary reason was to provide exposure to the use of spectroscopy to study the structure of chemical systems, complementing the exposure to quantitative spectroscopy provided via Beer’s law. The CF occasionally uses terminology in a specific manner that serves to limit the scope of the included content. In such cases, the terms are clearly defined in the document but may
BIG IDEAS AND SCIENCE PRACTICES FRAMING
Driving Questions
Design of the AP course clearly raises a wide variety of decision points, ranging from the top-level topics to be included down to the domain content and science practices paired in a specific learning objective. In debating and making such decisions, discussions were framed around the driving questions of big ideas and science practices, listed in bold below. The Big Ideas framing was a means to promote a more coherent and robust understanding of chemistry by ensuring that the course was not “a mile wide and an inch deep” but instead conveyed the most fundamental aspects of the discipline that inform our understanding of the natural world. Decisions regarding course content were framed around the driving question, “What is most important for students to understand about chemistry and what knowledge is essential to build and support that understanding?” This is reflected in the names given to the three levels of the concept outline: Big Ideas (BI), Enduring Understandings, and Essential Knowledge. The Big Ideas span structure and properties (BI1: atomic and BI2: molecular), chemical transformations (BI3: reactions and BI4: kinetics), and energy (BI5: thermodynamics and BI6: equilibrium), with lower levels of the outline describing knowledge needed to gain depth in each of these areas. The Science Practices approach was a means to promote depth by engaging students in the inquiry and reasoning skills of chemistry. In the course redesign, the notion of inquiry is not one of a particular style pedagogy, but rather of the types of student reasoning that inquiry instruction is meant to instill. These types of reasoning are codified in the Science Practices (SP), a two-level outline used across all AP science domains. 1277
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these efforts will ultimately come down to the impact on the community. From my perspective, the existing AP course was already of high quality. One can point to numerous studies that support the quality of instruction in AP courses.7−10 However, I am equally convinced by my interactions with the AP teachers, a group that is impressive in its willingness to hold their instruction to a nationally defined standard. When listening in on AP instructors discussing their teaching strategies, and the impacts on their students’ exam performance, I feel as though I am listening to sports coaches. Positioning teachers as coaches is, I believe, an important positive outcome of a nationally defined course and exam. The AP program also fosters a community that aspires toward a meritocracy of science teaching. Each year, hundreds of secondary and higher education instructors collaborate to write and grade the exam. An active professional development community exists through both formal College Board structures, such as workshops, and informal venues, such as sessions at educational conferences. The AP redesign provides an opportunity to both address existing concerns with the AP course and, perhaps more importantly, put structures in place that will allow the community to evolve the course to keep pace with improvements in science education. The word evolve is used intentionally here because gradual change is almost certainly the best means through which to improve complex educational systems. Nevertheless, the very notion of a “redesign” is of a precipitous character. I hope the degree of change was limited to that needed to institute a system that can foster healthy gradual change. Perhaps the most sudden change is in the means used to define the course. The published description of the legacy AP chemistry course defined the scope of the course with a onepage list of topics. Clearly, this is not sufficient and so the exam was, in practice, defined only by its past incarnations. What then is the means through which the exam can keep pace with changes in both science teaching and the demands being placed on our students? The legacy exam, and especially the freeresponse portion, did drift substantially under community influence and guidance. However, such changes were constrained by the intrinsic unfairness of such a mode of change: any deviation from the past can be viewed as unfair if the scope of the exam is defined by past exams. The scope of the exam is now communicated through 117 learning objectives that are the new standards for judging appropriateness of a question. A question is appropriate if it is viewed by the community as well aligned with one of these learning objectives. The intent is to keep changes to these learning objectives to a minimum. The gradual change will stem from what the community views as being well aligned with these objectives. As the community of AP instructors learns to better coach students to achieve these objectives, the exam will likewise evolve to reflect these performance levels. This is a tremendous advantage of a community written and graded exam. The measure of success of the redesign is the degree to which the redesigned course conveys the Big Ideas of chemistry to students while engaging them in the science practices of chemistry. My hope is that the learning objectives of the redesigned course provide a useful set of instructional goals that we, as a learning community, can move toward to ensure that AP chemistry continues to have a positive impact on our students, our schools, and our communities.
correspond to a restrictive use of those terms. Most notable may be the use of the phrase “thermodynamic favorability”, which is applied only to chemical reactions and refers only to the sign of the standard Gibb’s energy of the reaction, ΔG0. The distinction between ΔG and ΔG0 is not included in the CF because this distinction was viewed as a formal aspect of thermodynamics that does little to extend the ability of students to reason about the nonstandard conditions that are most relevant to the course. The tools needed to reason about such nonstandard conditions are already present in the equilibrium portion of the CF; for example, comparing Q to K, with the relation between ΔG0 and K providing the connection point. To ensure that students learn to make this link, LO 5.18 includes having students explain “[W]hy a thermodynamically unfavored chemical reaction can produce large amounts of product for certain sets of initial conditions”. The phrasing in this LO, and throughout the CF, relies on the phrase “unfavored chemical reaction” implying ΔG0 > 0. Although this choice of terminology is important for reading the CF, assessment items focus on chemical phenomena and so test only the ability of the student to reason about the given situation and not their understanding of the CF’s use of these terms.
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EXPANDED RANGE OF SCIENCE PRACTICES The CF also includes an expanded range of science practices. The addition of particulate-level representations is a particularly conspicuous outcome of this expansion. The molecular-level representations used in the course go beyond individual molecules to encompass collections of molecules. Such representations may help promote deeper understanding of the connections between intermolecular interactions and the properties that emerge from these interactions. Representations of collections of molecules may also promote deeper understanding of concepts related to the relative concentrations of molecules, such as the distinction between weak and strong acids, or the partitioning of chemical species between the liquid and solid phases in a gravimetric analysis. The distribution of the learning objectives across the full set of science practices relevant to chemistry has other consequences on the CF that, though less conspicuous than the addition of particulate-level representations, are at least as important. For example, the emphasis in chemical equilibrium has shifted away from complex quantitative algorithms and toward a broader range of practices, including estimation of quantities, interpretation of experimental data, construction of explanations, and drawing connections to other portions of the domain such as kinetics and thermodynamics. Examination of the LOs reveals a similarly broad distribution of science practices in each of the big ideas. Although there are many relevant details in the CF, the big picture of the redesign is that of coupling chemical concepts to a broad range of science practices. The goal is to promote learning of chemistry through construction and use of representations, quantitative computation and estimation, experimental design and interpretation, generation and evaluation of explanations, and integration of ideas within and across domains.
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LOOKING FORWARD I hope the above provides some useful insight into the intellectual framework that guided the redesign. The success of 1278
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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REFERENCES
(1) College Entrance Examination Board. The College Board Advanced Placement Program: A Brief History of the Advanced Placement Program; The College Board: New York, 2003. (2) The College Board. AP Chemistry Course and Exam Description Effective Fall 2013. http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/ pdf/ap/IN120085263_ChemistryCED_Effective_Fall_2013_lkd.pdf (accessed Jul 2014). (3) Committee on Programs for Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in American High Schools, Center for Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council. Learning and Understanding: Improving Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in U.S. High Schools; The National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2002. (4) Magrogan, S. AP Chemistry: Past, Present, and Future. J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91 (9), No. 10.1021/ed500096f. (5) Rushton, G. T. Improving High School Chemistry Teaching via the “Trickle Up” Effect: A Perspective on the New AP Chemistry Curriculum Framework. J. Chem. Educ. 2012, 89 (6), 692−693. (6) Benigna, J. Photoelectron Spectroscopy in Advanced Placement Chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 2014, 91 (9), No. 10.1021/ed500021c. (7) Morgan, R.; Klaric, J. AP Students in College: An Analysis of FiveYear Academic Careers (Research Report No. 2007−4); The College Board: New York, 2007. (8) Patterson, B. F.; Ewing, M. Validating the Use of AP Exam Scores for College Course Placement (Research Rep. No. 2013−2); The College Board: New York, 2013. (9) Kaliski, P.; Godfrey, K. Does the Type of High School Science Course Matter? An Investigation of the Relationship Between Science Courses and First-Year College Outcomes; The College Board: New York, In Press. (10) Patterson, B. F.; Packman, S.; Kobrin, J. L. Advanced Placement Exam-Taking and Performance: Relationships with First-Year Subject Area College Grades (Research Rep. No. 2011−4); The College Board: New York, 2011.
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