For complex reasons[1] that I won’t go into here, my teaching partner and I had to choose one of those “AP prep books” for our Psychology students to use next year.
We bought a copy of each of the major brands: Barron’s AP Psychology, 7th edition, 5 Steps to a 5, AP Psychology 2016, and Cracking the AP Psychology Exam, 2016[2]. When they arrived, I flipped through the index of our textbook, David G Myers’ Psychology for AP, 2nd edition and chose four topics to review across the three prep books. I made a rubric for my colleague and I to use, which we could then compare:
While one of my sophomore modern world history classes was working on a blended-learning activity elsewhere on campus, he and I met to assess the prep books. Our completed rubrics… did not align:
So, we had to talk through our ratings a bit; some, it turned out, we actually agreed upon and had just scored them differently. In the end, we decided on the 5 Steps to a 5 because of its “voice.” Having read several pages (only) of each, we both agreed that the narrative style of Laura Maitland would be the most engaging for our students. Further, the 5 Steps did not go into excessive detail, as we’d found with the Princeton Review. We both really liked the organization and the coverage of the Barron’s book, but simply felt that the “voice” in the 5 Steps was better suited to our students.
At the end of the 2016–17 year, I’ll post again with a reflection – my own as well as some from students – on how the prep book did.
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Reasons unrelated to our pass-rate, I egotistically feel obliged to note. ↩
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Commonly referred to as “the Princeton Review”. ↩