Contexts Matter: Implementing a Project-Based Advanced Placement Government Course Across Urban School Systems

• In Event: Advanced Placement Government in Poverty-Impacted Urban Settings: Multidisciplinary Research on Access, Learning, Literacy, and Engagement

Abstract

Objective. This paper examines contextual factors that emerged as this design-based implementation research “migrated” (Brown, 1993) in year 3 from a well-resourced suburban school district to three poverty-impacted urban school systems. Specifically, this paper examines at the ways in which aspects of the school setting –school culture, socioeconomic status of students, building leadership, and a school’s history with AP courses – shaped how the alternative PBL-AP design was implemented.

Perspective. When studying the effects of curricular changes on student learning, it is necessary to take into account the mediating effects of the school context (Fullan and Hargreaves, 1996; Goodlad, 2004; Honig, 2012; Nieto, 1999; Sarason, 1996). In an era when teacher ability is often trumpeted as the most significant cause of student learning, more complicated contextual issues can, by contrast, lose both attention and resonance. Like others who study school context, our data suggest it is salient; furthermore, by comparing suburban to urban contexts, and then urban-to-urban contexts, our data counter simple generalizations.

Methods & Data Sources. Our aim was not a “hothouse” experiment that would display what is possible but improbable. Instead, this DBIR proceeded with an eye to scale. Researchers “must operate always under the constraint that an effective intervention should be able to migrate from our experimental classroom to average classrooms operated by and for average students and teachers, supported by realistic technological and personal support” (Brown, 1992). We aimed for a design that could migrate from the suburban environment in which it was developed, where there was interest in and a supportive infrastructure for research and development, to poverty-impacted urban schools where increasing numbers of students are being required to take APGOV. DBIR is well-suited to this aim.
This study was conducted in high schools across one suburban and three urban school systems (including one urban charter network). School and classroom observations, interviews with teachers and students, and analyses of schools’ academic records, students’ graduation rates, students’ college admissions rates, and standardized test scores all contributed to portraits of the schools’ culture and history.

Results/conclusions. The findings section will detail, first, that while each school implemented more or less the same PBL-AP curriculum, both its form and the attendant issues varied widely across schools and systems. Schools with greater support from the administration (including basic knowledge of the project as a whole—that it was happening) and a coherent culture of achievement and teacher collaboration had more deliberate implementation plans and activities. Second, while the majority of the students responded positively to the course, their interpretation evaluations of the course and its PBL design varied depending on school context.

Significance. Context mattered as a structural force (Giddens, 1984) that shaped this curriculum innovation as it migrated across school and system contexts. As greater numbers of urban schools adopt “rigorous” curricula in the name of “equity,” unanticipated consequences may arise, including student failure, which can negatively impact learner identity and sense of college readiness.

Author

• Diem T. Nguyen, University of Washington