AP Seminar: Feb 26-March 2

I hope you’re enjoying your weekend! AP Seminar students should be hard at work on developing research questions for our second performance task this weekend. By Monday, they need to have finished a blog entry about their question and added their rough draft of their question to a shared class spreadsheet. Please ask them to tell you about their research question. Forming a good question and being able to articulate what it is you are trying to find out is key to a successful project.


From now until Spring Break, we will be working primarily on Performance Task 2 which will make up 35% of the students’ final AP Scores. When this is done, they’ll have 55% of the score complete; the remaining 45% comes from the timed exam they will take on May 8 (more on that another week!).

For performance task 2, students read six texts from The College Board that all loosely connect to a central theme. We’ve discussed each text at length in class. Now, students need to develop a research question based on one of those texts. They will write a 2000 word essay arguing for a solution to the problem they’ve identified. Then, they’ll develop and present a 6-8 minute presentation similar to the group presentations you already saw--just independently this time.  Finally, they’ll be scored on their “oral defense” of their project. I’ll ask them two questions that they need to use their research to answer.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s really the only thing we’ll be doing in this class until mid-April.

How can you help?

• Ask your student to tell you about his or her research question. Talking helps so much!! If your student is having a hard time articulating what he wants to research, try taking notes while they talk. A lot of times they say great things and don’t realize they have the start of a great idea. Seeing it in writing helps.
  

• Periodically ask about progress.  For some students, the greatest challenge of PT2 is the independence. In PT1, they had their group members to hold them accountable. In this one, they have to do it for themselves.  To that end, I’m not really “allowed” by the College Board to grade their rough drafts or outlines or anything leading up to the project. The intention is to make this as college-like as possible:  A big assignment with one deadline.  I will give them lots of smaller deadlines, but there won’t be points attached to those deadlines in most cases.  I will record them in MiStar, so if you see a bunch of “not graded” assignments popping up as 1s and 0s, you will know your student is falling behind.
  

Thanks for reading and your interest in our work! I’m so excited about the questions that are bubbling up with this topic. I think the students are going to have a good time with it.