Washington, D.C., May 2, 2006 - The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $1.8-million grant to the College Board, a nonprofit association, to redesign Advanced Placement (AP) program courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental science. The College Board has administered the AP program, which enables students to pursue college-level studies while still in high school, for 50 years.

Redesign work, which will start this summer with commissions appointed for each of the four AP science disciplines, will be completed in December 2007. 
 
"The grant money will go towards redesigning the AP biology, AP environmental sciences, AP chemistry, and AP physics courses," said Trevor Packer, executive director, Advanced Placement Program, the College Board. "We will pull together experts in those areas to review and research ways to improve those courses, and based on their study, we will put together meetings from July to March to implement changes." The new  science courses will be launched in the fall of 2009. 

Leading the project is Dr. Pellegrino, liberal arts and sciences distinguished professor of cognitive psychology and distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Pellegrino was on the panel of leading educators and policy makers who took questions from a packed auditorium at the announcement of the award on Tuesday at the Science Committee Room in the Rayburn House office buidling. 
 
Other participants included Arden Bement Jr., director of the NSF; Davis S. Ely, a science teacher for 33 years with more than 25 years' experience of teaching AP biology; Judith Wurtzel, senior fellow, Education and Society Program; the Aspen Institute; and Shirley Malcom, head of the directorate for education and human resources programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Marsha Reeves Jews, chief development officer at Career Communications Group Inc., asked what plans the project had for upgrading quality in schools in urban and rural communities to enable students to take accelerated courses like the AP. Shirley Malcom responded that attention needs to be paid to the quality of learning in schools and not just to AP courses.

Although the College Board’s second annual Advanced Placement Report to the Nation, released in February 2006, shows that all 50 states and the District of Columbia have achieved an increase in the percentage of high school students earning a grade of 3 or higher in college-level AP courses since 2000, Black and Native American students remain significantly under-represented in AP classrooms. 
 
Nationwide, African-American students make up 13.4 percent of the student population, but only 6.4 percent of AP exam-takers, and Native Americans make up 1.1 percent of the student population, but only 0.5 percent of the AP examinee population. 
 
At 13.4 percent of the student population and 13.6 percent of AP examinees, Hispanic students are well represented in AP classrooms nationally, according to the report; however, Latino students remain under-represented in AP programs in many states.
 
The report warned that despite the strides made by educators to provide traditionally under-represented students with AP courses, lower performances on AP exams indicate that many-high-potential teachers and students are not receiving adequate preparation for the rigors of an AP course. As a result, traditionally under-represented students currently demonstrate significantly lower performances on AP exams.

Two goals of the American Competitiveness Inititaive - a proposal announced by President Bush in February 2006 to improve training of science teachers, increase federal funding for basic research, and enhance the climate for private investment in R&D - are 300 grants to be made available to schools to implement research-based math curricula, and 700,000 advanced placement tests to be passed by low-income students.  

"The challenge is not to find better ways of teaching facts," said Arden Bement. "Rather, it is to find better ways of teaching students how to observe, imagine, frame questions, and learn by experimentation. These are the fundamentals of science¯the principles that can prepare students for a world in which change comes faster than any course or test could ever change."