In recent years, the study of musical cultures has gained popularity as a curricular intervention for increasing cultural diversity in school music curricula. Informed by Michel Foucault's analytics of power-as-effects, this paper examines some of the underlying epistemic premises of the notion of musical culture as it operates in music curricula.…

Disciplinary activity in science is tool-mediated, and instructional designers often build in opportunities for students to use the conceptual and material tools of the discipline as they engage in activity. When this activity takes place in schools, students and teachers may modify or reject disciplinary tools to fit the goals of schooling. We…

The IB DP is widely perceived as a globally recognised, outstanding international curriculum by a growing number of education scholars and policymakers in South Korea. Recently, education authorities from certain provinces have taken steps to adopt the IB DP in public high schools, contending that the programme will improve and galvanise teaching…

Students report experiencing elevated levels of academic stress while in Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD) classes. In response, we developed a classwide, preventative coping and connectedness curriculum, which consists of 12 50-minute modules for 9th-grade students enrolled in accelerated coursework. In this…

From 2012-2015, Advanced Placement (AP) science courses underwent a large-scale curricular reform to include more scientific inquiry and reasoning, reduce emphasis on broad content coverage, and focus on depth of understanding, with corresponding changes in high-stakes AP examinations. In this study, we explored how teachers prepared for and…

This article examines Advanced Placement Human Geography (AP HG) in the context of its place in efforts to reform geography education. It presents a critical analysis of the AP program and its curriculum, asserting that it represents "powerful knowledge" as conceptualized by Young. It concludes with a call for research in AP HG aligned…

Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography faced a number of hurdles that nearly derailed the course before it launched in 2000-2001. A dedicated cadre of geography professionals and high school teachers rose to the challenge and the course remains one of the fastest growing AP courses currently offered by College Board. Seventeen readers and leaders…

Economic geographers have traditionally concerned themselves with the primary and secondary sectors of the economy. As the world becomes more service-oriented, however, as much attention must be paid to the service economy and the role of technology. This article focuses on deindustrialization and the rise of the contemporary service--and…

Over the past fifteen years, AP Human Geography has grown in numbers and spread to almost every state. This article synopsizes the early history of the subject, summarizes the course and the exam, highlights positive impacts on the discipline of geography, and focuses on the following three issues: teachers who come to the course having majored in…

Advanced high-school courses, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses in the United States, present a content selection conundrum of major proportions. Judicious content selection is necessary if students are to learn subject matter meaningfully, but the sheer breadth of tested material in these courses promotes nearly the opposite:…

The most promising intervention for improving learning and reducing academic gaps in outcomes is present in every classroom: the "teacher". Teachers empowered to create relationship-centric, supportive classroom and school cultures, combined with rigorous academics, produce breakthrough results for their students. Three nonprofits'…

Over the past decade, the field of teacher professional learning has coalesced around core characteristics of high quality professional development experiences (e.g. Borko, Jacobs, & Koellner, 2010. Contemporary approaches to teacher professional development. In P. L. Peterson, E. Baker, & B. McGaw (Eds.), "International encyclopedia…

Development of benchtop, portable Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and infrared (IR) spectrometers has opened up opportunities for creating university-high school partnerships that provide high school students with hands-on experience with NMR and IR instruments. With recent changes to the international baccalaureate chemistry…

The College and Career Readiness Expansion project was a five-year, federally funded effort to implement early college strategies in comprehensive high schools. This report presents the results from a quasi-experimental impact study of the project and a mixed methods examination of its implementation. Results showed that the program increased the…

It is unknown how the school can best influence the variables that determine pursuance of science study and career choice to bring about greater opportunity to learn challenging science curriculum for all students and promote Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. Student decisions regarding the type of science class to…