At our October AP Teach meeting, “Relieving the Boredom of Review: New Strategies for Problem Sets and Using Labs to Drive Instruction,” we explored ways to replace traditional problem sets with engaging, instructional activities that work year-round and during review. Kristen Vanderveen kicked off the meeting by sharing a station activity that she recently used in her classroom while teaching gases. The activity gets students moving around the room to visit various stations to work on a variety of problems. Students do at least one of each type of problem (there are two of each problem type), which allows for student choice. The activity can also be used to differentiate by providing problems with varying degrees of challenge. Students get immediate feedback because they can see the solutions to the problems at the station. Sue Biggs presented her Molar Mass of a Gas lab. The lab is designed to be used as instruction or even a review activity. The pre-lab uses questions to guide students through core gas concepts, while the error analysis questions prompt deeper thinking. In breakout rooms, teachers shared their strategies for guiding students through practice problems and the review activities their students love. Our next meeting will be on Thursday, November 20th at 8:00 PM ET. Look for the announcement on our Facebook group. We hope you will join us!
Relieving the Boredom of Review
Lessons Learned from the 2025 AP Chemistry Exam
Video highlights from the October 2025 APTeach Session.
View the PRESENTATION SLIDEDECK and access resource links shared in the full presentation.
See supplemental material for files mentioned in slide deck
YouTube Playlist: AP Unit on Gases
Watch the APTeach Session Notes and Updates article for summaries of past meetings and announcements for upcoming presentations.
Each one-hour APTeach Zoom session provides 15-20 minutes of discussion centered around a challenging chemistry topic, followed by breakout rooms that allow small groups of teachers to share their best teaching practices related to that content.
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