Re: [Phys-l] study of IP and AB

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

I read through most of the report, and as I suspected the report is
basically the personal opinion of one reviewer/subject.  The reviewers were
all picked to agree with the orientation of the Fordham Foundation.

For Biology, their bias is towards facts and definitions.  They do not
acknowledge that most science curricula are a mile wide and an inch deep,
although they mention that is a criticism of most curricula by some people.
They do not place any importance on inquiry and on student understanding of
the nature of science.  Actually they deprecate this.  There is also no
mention of any research results vs what the college board is testing.

Again, the recent Sadler report shows that physics AP courses are not very
effective.  But then of course, he might find the same thing is true of many
college courses.

The Fordham report is basically an opinion piece with no research behind it.
There is some good research on Biology curricula by Anton Lawson at AZ
State.  Actually his research shows that the level of student thinking
increases dramatically when a learning cycle approach is used, but remains
fairly low if it is not.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> The Fordham foundation recently put out a report evaluating AP
> and IB.  The evaluation goes into some detail.
>
> Entry point:
>   http://edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=378
> Nutshell summary:
>   http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/APIB_Nutshell.pdf
> Full report (52 pages) [recommended]:
>   http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/APIB.pdf
>
> And there is a Washington Post article on the subject that I found
> amusing:
>   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
> dyn/content/article/2007/11/13/AR2007111300695.html?hpid=news-col-blog
>
> To boil down the report to few sentences, the foundation found
> the AP and IB situation to be "mostly encouraging".  This is in
> stark contrast to their opinion of state standards, "which have
> consistently shown that expectations for American primary and
> secondary students are typically weak and watered down."