At the Advanced Placement Annual Conference, which took place last weekend, College Board Vice President Trevor Packer stated that the future of AP curriculum is changing.

The benefit of an AP course load in high school has been documented by research showing that AP students perform better and are more likely to graduate on time than "matched peers" (academic equals) who do not have AP credit.  Time management, work ethic and thinking skills that AP students learn directly correlate to an enhanced college experience.

The College Board plans to implement a new strategy to promote a better understanding between AP teachers and college professors as to the content and value of AP curricula.  A clearer understanding of what each AP score means and how AP learnings equate to the college course curriculum is needed.

Other issues discussed were the discrepancy in content across high school AP courses and the need to structure these courses around skills that will be valuable in higher education, such as in the direction of learning themes rather than memorizing facts. AP teachers have suggested that they must sacrifice depth and breadth of a topic in order to cover the content necessary prior to the exam. Packer stated that the College Board continually works to improve the AP experience and to ensure that what is being taught corresponds as closely as possible to the related college curriculum.

In many high schools, the availability and quality of professional development for AP teachers is lacking. Many teachers only have access to the required one-week course before they begin teaching AP, in part because their schools don’t set aside money for this purpose. Packer offered that AP teachers need at least 20 additional hours of training per year.  He noted that College Board is developing a program whereby teachers could download modules online throughout the year related to their subject. The modules will include “tools for a teacher to design, deliver, assess and adjust instruction.”

Additional ideas to improve the AP program included making testing dates flexible, delivering scores earlier, eliminating tape-recorder dependencies, and enabling computer-based testing.

The current plan is for new French, German and world history courses to be introduced at the beginning of the 2011 school year; biology, U.S. history, Spanish literature, and European history in 2012; and chemistry, physics 1, physics 2, and Spanish language in 2013.

Based on information from "Inside Higher Education".