The Right Practice at the Right Time

Design elements of AP’s new instructional resources got a spotlight at this year’s College Board Forum. AP teachers, counselors, and school and district administrators learned about the new unit structures and how AP course content and skills weave and repeat within and across units.

For years, AP teachers relied on released exams to offer practice to their students, even when that meant the questions from released exams were imperfect matches to what they had just taught. The new set of instructional materials changes all of that. AP students now have opportunities for daily practice and feedback throughout the year – practice with questions written to assess specific knowledge paired with a specific skill at a specific time.

Members of the Advanced Placement team, Edward Biedermann, Dana Kopelman, and Claire Lorenz, offered a tour of the course and exam descriptions for fall 2019, and showed how the CEDs were designed to spiral and scaffold course content and skills so that students have the right practice and the right time of the year.

Each new CED provides teachers with:

1. A unit structure that organizes course content
2. A suggested sequence and pace to teach course content
3. Skill spiral within and across units to ensure a repetition of skill practice  
4. Skill scaffold within and across units to ensure practice builds in skill complexity
5. Topic questions that pair specific content with a specific skill so that teachers can check for student understanding at the moment of instruction
6. Personal Progress Checks for each unit that give feedback on the progress students are making with the content and skills needed for success in the course

More than 82,000 AP teachers have already taken advantage of these free, new resources.

Log in to AP Classroom to start using them today!