My AP Statistics Plans for Notes and Homework

 I'm teaching AP Statistics for the first time this year. I'm using Math Medic for class activities and notes. Math Medic is my go-to for all of my math classes. I don't have Math Medic's assessment platform for AP Stats, but I felt I needed more practice for students than just the check your understanding questions. We do have a textbook, but it isn't easily organized by topic, so I wanted another source for practice questions.  

I had heard Skew the Script referenced regularly in the AP Stats communities that I'm a part of, so decided that I would use their practice sets. Over the summer, I planned out every day of the year to make sure we would get through all of the content before the AP exam. 

Both Math Medic and Skew the Script provide answer keys to each of their lessons, which is helpful to me as a first year Stats teacher.

In my year-long plans, I include the name and number of the Math Medic lesson and the lesson number of the Skew the Script lesson as well as the topic numbers from the AP Statistics CED. 

Here are my AP Statistics Unit Plans. 

A New Way to Do Test Corrections for AP Environmental Science

Curves on Unit tests in AP classes is always a hot topic in the AP Facebook groups...at least the ones that I'm a part of. For the AP Unit tests that I give, I give the square root curve. Yes, I know it's a big curve, but I am determined to keep these AP classes accessible to any student who would like to take them, and this curve is part of what helps make that happen. The curve doesn't come for free though. Students must complete test corrections to "earn" the curve. I want to do whatever I can to help them actually learn this material. 

I used to have students explain why the right answer was the right answer for the multiple choice questions, but many students struggled with it and tended to just restate the question and answer or would write an incorrect explanation, which isn't helpful.  So now, for each question they get wrong, they write the essential knowledge statement that they feel goes with the question. (And this adds another use to the document I give them with all the LOs and EKs for the unit.) I have decided to expand that to them also using statements from their video notes and review book, so they don't write the same EK more than once. 

To help students narrow down which EK to use, I download the assessment that I've made on AP Classroom and then use adobe acrobat to add which topic each question is from. Students take the MCQ portion of their unit tests in the lockdown browser of AP Classroom, but when they do corrections (in my classroom), I give them the printed copy of MCQs to work with. 

Even though they take their test through AP Classroom, I have them also bubble their answers into a Zipgrade form. After the test, I print out their results from Zipgrade which includes their answers and what the correct answers are. This way, they know exactly which questions they need to do corrections on. They need this since I only allow access to their scores on AP Classroom, no question information. I print a few sets of MCQs, since only a few students come in to do corrections at a time, so there are typically enough copies to share. 

I have been liking this new way of doing test corrections far more than the old way, and at least students are writing true statements on their corrections!

AP Environmental Science LOs and EKs by Unit

In past years I had been using another AP Environmental teacher's documents that outlined the learning objectives and essential knowledge statements for each unit. I had some students who appreciated seeing the list of key concepts that they needed to know for the units as they prepared for tests. When I tried to use the first unit document at the end of the summer, I realized that the link was no longer active. I searched through the AP Environmental teachers Facebook group and found a spreadsheet with all of the information for every unit. I thought I might try to use ChatGPT to help me remake the documents by unit. This turned out to be a bigger challenge than I anticipated. By the beginning of the school year, I had rough drafts of each of the documents, but so far, only the first 6 units are finished as final documents. 

In these documents, the learning objectives have been converted into "I can" statements, organized by topics with essential knowledge statements below. At the end of the document there are tables that include the key enduring understandings and science practices for that unit. 

I've turned out to use the documents far more than I thought I would for this year's class. These documents are the first pages in the packet I hand out to students at the beginning of the unit. As we are reviewing for the unit test, I make note of some of the key essential knowledge statements based on the questions that will be on the test. Students highlight and make notes as well on their copies. I also started using the document for test corrections. This needs a blog post of its own though. 

One other note. I teach at a Christian school and last year, my scores for Biblical integration were not stellar. I was surprised, since for me I think of AP Environmental Science as a way to learn how God expects us to take care of the earth. To me, it's all Biblical. Part of my change to be more explicit this year, was to add a verse to these documents that I felt fit well with the topics of the units. Obviously, this will not work for all classes, but if you want to use these documents, feel free to edit after you make your copy of the document. 

Here are links to the documents that are final draft.

Unit 1 "I can" statements

Unit 2 "I can" statements

Unit 3 "I can" statements

Unit 4 "I can" statements

Unit 5 "I can" statements

Unit 6 "I can" statements