Talking Points - The Rural AP Advantage

Michael Barbour (mbarbour@coe.uga.edu)                                    Dennis Mulcahy (dmulcahy@mun.ca)

                University of Georgia at Athens                                       Memorial University of Newfoundland

The Study

            The general purpose of this study in progress is to examine the retention rates and student achievement on standardised (e.g., College Board) exams in the AP curriculum across the province.  The primary aim of this study is to explore the similarities and differences between retention rates and student achievement between different models of AP delivery (i.e., classroom-based, web-based, or independent study).

Advanced Placement in Newfoundland and Labrador

            During the 1992-93 school year, the Advanced Placement (AP) program was introduced into the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.  Initially, schools embraced this opportunity to provide their students with advanced learning opportunities in a wide range of subject areas that had been previous unavailable to students.

            However, it only took a few years before the AP program was relegated to urban and large regional high schools.  The general trend became that more urban and fewer rural schools were able to offer AP courses.  As with most schools in rural areas, they simply did not have the required number of students, many were unable to offer such a curriculum (or did so to the disadvantage of other students and teachers, who found larger class sizes to accommodate the few students taking these AP courses).  In some schools, the brightest two or three students were able to access the AP through independent study.  In this environment, rural schools could not offer the same opportunities as their larger, urban counterparts.

            Beginning in the 1998-99 school year, the Vista School District embarked on the first of its two web-based AP initiatives.  "The Vista District Digital Intranet: The Delivery of Advanced Placement Courses to Young Adult Learners in Rural Communities" (VDI) was a federally funded project of the Vista School District and the Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland that allowed any student in the district to enrol in AP biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics.  Prior to the creation of the VDI, only three of the ten schools with secondary grades were able to offer AP courses to their students.  Two years later, a teacher and an administrator at Discovery Collegiate in Bonavista, spearheaded a second initiative to offer the AP social studies courses (i.e., the Centre for Advanced Placement Education).  These projects were shared with the Burin Peninsula School District until 2001-02.

            While both of these initiatives have ceased, there have been other web-based AP program in the province.  The Baie Verte-Central-Connaigre and Lewisporte-Gander School Districts shared a web-based AP Physics course during the 1999-2000 school year.  Beginning in the 1999-2000 the Avalon West School District began its web-based AP program, which still continues to grow in both the number of students and the variety of AP courses offered.  Finally, even the urban Avalon East School District piloted a web-based AP Physics course during the 2002-03 school year, with courses in AP Psychology, AP European History, and AP Environmental Science in development for web-based delivery for the 2004-05 school year.

Research Questions

1.      Is their a difference in retention rates in Advanced Placement course by delivery model?

2.      Is their a difference in student achievement on the AP exam by delivery model?

Data as of April 8, 2004

·        early in 2004, 82 schools were indicated as having offered AP courses since 1992-93 according to the Newfoundland Department of Education’s Annual General Report

o       55 of these were still open

o       11 had simply changed names and/or buildings

o       16 had closed altogether

·        to date, twenty of the remaining schools have responded to this survey

o       this represents 24 of the original 82 schools

o       no school has been able to provide a complete data set due to the time involved in the request, school closings and consolidation, and administrative and teaching staff turnover

o       in addition, some of the schools identified by the Department’s Annual General Report have never actually offered AP courses at their school

Table 1 – Geographic

Urban is defined as a community of 5000 people or more.

Table 2 – Delivery Model

Table 3 – Geographic and Delivery Model