Research has shown that student access and achievement in advanced precollege chemistry has been largely inequitable when considering certain demographic factors. In this nonexperimental observational study, an intersectional analysis of ethnicity and gender was utilized to examine United States student participation and performance (N = 146,610)…

This quantitative study describes how teachers responded to the large-scale, top-down, mandated curriculum and examination reform of the Advanced Placement (AP) program in chemistry. This study analyzed data from a nationwide sample of teachers (N = 1,062) teaching redesigned AP Chemistry courses in the first two years of the curriculum reform.…

Effective diffusion of educational innovations is essential for evidence-based practices to have broad impacts on student learning. One of the barriers to such diffusion is the large inertia associated with changing one's teaching practices. Educational disruptions, such as COVID-19, may lower this barrier by making business-as-usual no longer…

Both the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the new AP Chemistry curriculum focus on a deeper understanding of content, as well as application of concepts within science classes. A well accepted research-based method for improving student understanding and the ability to apply many of the abstract concepts presented in chemistry is…

To support teaching and learning in the advanced placement (AP) chemistry laboratory, the College Board published a laboratory manual, "AP Chemistry Guided-Inquiry Experiments: Applying the Science Practices," in 2013 as part of the redesigned course. This article provides a discussion of the rationale for the existence of the manual as…

Teachers use multiple representations to communicate the concepts of bonding, including Lewis structures, formulas, space-filling models, and 3D manipulatives. As students learn to interpret these multiple representations, they may develop misconceptions that can create problems in further learning of chemistry. Interviews were conducted with 28…

The 2013-2014 academic year marks the rollout of the redesigned advanced placement (AP) chemistry course and exam. There have been many questions as to why the course was redesigned and how the new examination will differ from its legacy version. In this article we give a brief overview of the legacy course and examine why a redesign occurred in…

Photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) is a new addition to the Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry curriculum. This article explains the rationale for its inclusion, an overview of how the PES instrument records data, how the data can be analyzed, and how to include PES data in the course. Sample assessment items and analysis are included, as well as…

The article describes the use of Mathematica, a computer algebra system (CAS), in a high school chemistry course. Mathematica was used to generate a graph, where a slider controls the value of parameter(s) in the equation; thus, students can visualize the effect of the parameter(s) on the behavior of the system. Also, Mathematica can show the…

The advanced placement course audit was implemented to standardize the college-level curricular and resource requirements for AP courses. While the process has had this effect, it has brought with it misconceptions about how much the College Board intends to control what happens within the classroom, what information is required to be included in…

This paper compares the performance of students at a high-performing U.S. public school (n = 64) on the advanced placement (AP) chemistry exam to their performance on the ChemQuery assessment system. The AP chemistry exam was chosen because, as the National Research Council acknowledges, it is the "perceived standard of excellence and school…

Multiple-choice questions are an important part of large-scale summative assessments, such as the advanced placement (AP) chemistry exam. However, past AP chemistry exam items often lacked the ability to test conceptual understanding and higher-order cognitive skills. The redesigned AP chemistry exam shows a distinctive shift in item types toward…

Two different versions of "big ideas" rooted content maps have recently been published for general chemistry. As embodied in the content outline from the College Board, one of these maps is designed to guide curriculum development and testing for advanced placement (AP) chemistry. The Anchoring Concepts Content Map for general chemistry…

As advanced placement (AP) teachers strive to implement the changes outlined in the AP chemistry redesign, they will have the opportunity to reflect on and evaluate their current practices. For many AP teachers, the new focus on conceptual understanding, reasoning, inquiry, and critical thinking over memorization and algorithmic problem solving…

This article introduces the "Data First" approach and shows how the observation and analysis of scientific data can be used as a scaffold to build conceptual understanding in chemistry through inductive reasoning. The "Data First" approach emulates the scientific process by changing the order by which we introduce data. Rather…