College Board offers an excellent online resource for teachers and students. It's not free, but my school district pays the bill. AP Insight provides curriculum outlines, teaching ideas and resources, student handouts, and digitally-graded assessments.
In my last post, I discussed my first year chemistry scope and sequence. Here, I continue with AP chemistry scope and sequence, and a little bit with how I developed it the year before, the summer before, and during the year. Keep in mind, I consider the work I do with students to always be a project in progress. I learn so much from working with them as they engage with the content through a different perspective than I have.
I published an article about an independent study unit I use with my AP Chemistry class two years ago, A guided group inquiry lesson on coordination compounds and complex ions. In the time since it was published, I have expanded the unit quite a bit and written some new assignments to go along with it. I use this unit every year as a post AP activity and am very fond of it. I thought some of my readers might enjoy seeing how it has changed and get access to the new assignments I have developed for it.
Guiding principles in my scope and sequence: Start with a simple representations of the nanoscopic and dig deep. Hopefully, by the time we start with vital, albeit often more challenging symbolic representations (mole, stoichiometry, solutions), students have a decent foundation to build upon.
In the lab, students are given a 1.5 gram samples of copper. The copper is taken through a series of five chemical reactions ending with the precipitation of solid copper. After the five reactions, students are asked to return their 1.5 gram samples of copper to the teacher.
It’s review season for AP courses! I have a love/hate relationship with the date of the AP Chemistry exam. On one hand, it’s SO early. On the other hand, because it’s the first exam, my students actually study for it (compared to later in the AP exam season when students are like, “I’m done. I don’t care anymore.”).
I just wanted to share a resource that I have been using since I started teaching AP chemistry last year.
As I write this, it is the day before the national AP Chemistry exam. We’ve been working toward this day since August. We’ve endured late hours, broken crucibles, anxiety, and tears. I’ve run weekend and evening review sessions, we’ve ta
The new AP Chemistry curriculum is in the second year of use. Photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) is a topic that generated much discussion because it is an addition to the curriculum. Jamie Benigna of Michigan teaches AP Chemistry, is an AP reader and recently wrote an article about PES for the Journal of Chemistry Education Special Issue. The article discusses the rationale for including PES in the course, explains some background of PES and provides strategies for including PES in your own course. This article is offered as a free preview of the AP Special Issue.
There have been many conversations within the Chemistry Education community surrounding the revisions to the AP curriculum. Twitter has been buzzing with instructors debating how to implement the changes, conferences and workshops have participants deconstructing the data from last year’s exam, and classroom teachers are working diligently to prepare their students for this year’s test. One way the College Board has tried to shift the AP curriculum away from algorithmic problem solving and toward more meaningful conceptual understanding is through the use of particle diagrams.
