Pennsylvania teachers report bringing Reading Apprenticeship to their AP courses—with outstanding results. Teachers Sandra Jameson (Nazareth Area High School), Barbara Moss (Abington Heights High School), and Alicia Ross (Blue Ridge High School) all credit Reading Apprenticeship with giving their students a full point or more advantage on the AP exams. Here are some details from Blue Ridge.
Blue Ridge High School is a Title I school that draws 335 students from a 100-square-mile area comprising Pennsylvania State Game Lands Number 35 and State Game Lands 175, for the most part. It’s rural here. Forty-seven percent of students receive free and reduced-price lunch. Seventeen percent take AP exams, and Alicia Ross teaches those students who enroll in AP Macroeconomics and AP U.S. Government and Politics. She’s been learning how to use Reading Apprenticeship to help students in all her courses, but she just received the AP students’ exam scores, so she has some concrete evidence of how it’s going. She’s “over the moon.”
In her second year using Reading Apprenticeship instructional approaches to promote content area literacy, she couldn’t be prouder of her students. “I more fully committed to the Reading Apprenticeship process,” she says, “and it paid big dividends.” Of the 17 students in her two AP courses, for example, most of the students scored 5s. The roll call resulted in ten 5s, four 4s, one 3, and two 2s. One student, who scored a 2 last year in the government course went on this year to receive a 4 in macroeconomics.
“This student has so much grit,” Alicia says, “and this 4 meant the world to him. He messaged me on the day he found out.”
“I’m still sad about the 2s,” she adds, thinking about how to help those students also turn 2s into 4s, but she’s not discouraged. “The amount of both growth and confidence that students in our school have displayed as a result of Reading Apprenticeship has been absolutely stunning.”