AP Seminar: Sept. 19-23

This week in AP Seminar it’s time to really get down to business. Students have considered multiple perspectives, practiced identifying lines of reasoning and begun to develop their own focus areas for research.  This week, I’m setting them loose on their own research to flesh out their answers to this question:

What does it mean to be wealthy?

On Friday, students started brainstorming their answers to that question, and we quickly discovered that there were a million different directions to go with the answer.  Some want to talk about wealth in America vs. other countries. Others want to talk about the different definitions of wealth (monetary vs emotional).  Others are interested in the psychology of satisfaction: what do our brains need to feel “wealthy”?  Hopefully, they’ve been sharing these questions and ideas with you over the weekend.

On Monday and Tuesday this week, we will start exploring the two main databases we will use for our research this year and next year.  Learning to use databases effectively is an essential skill for Capstone students and one they will find very useful when they hit college. Novi subscribes to several excellent databases, but we will do the bulk of our research in JStor, a database that they will likely continue to use at the college level.  The other database we will use is Ebsco.  This database is available to our students through the AP Capstone program and will be another resource they will likely encounter in their college studies.

After we dive into our research the first half of the week, we will spend the remainder of the week sifting through what we’ve found and starting to draft our written responses. By the end of the week, students will have a good start on their first writing assignment.  This week you will also start to see grades popping up in MiStar. Please remember that these are simply a measure of where students are right now.  All of the skills we are working on this semester will be repeated and revisited multiple times. If students are not mastering a particular skill right now, they’ll have lots of chances to improve.

Have a great week!

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