Teaching Comparative

Evaluating the evaluation

What do these words have in common?

• contrast
• define
• describe
• explain
• identify
• provide

If you guessed that these were the verbs from this year's FRQs on the AP Comparative exam, you'd be right. (The questions have been released and are available at AP Central.)

These words and the tasks they indicate are exactly what you and your students should have expected from the sample questions and last year's exam.

Contrast was used once; define, three times; describe, eight times; explain, twice; identify, seven times, and provide once. The context for the use of provide indicated that it meant "explain."

In addition, in one question students were asked to describe two things. And students were asked to identify 3 things in two questions and 2 things in another.

So we might consider that identify was used a dozen times and describe four times.

As I noted in earlier posts (here and here), there's not a lot of intellectual or academic "heavy lifting" in these questions. Contrast and explain just barely rise above the most basic of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives.

If students were asked to do 28 "things" in the FRQs, 24 of those "things" were basically recall.

There were comparisons in the questions, but they weren't the high level comparisons students often fear. The comparisons asked students to identify common functions, similarities, and differences. One comparision asked students to recall details about two systems without explicitly comparing them. The contrast question - the most comparative one - asked for an explicit comparison about political economies.

There's a problem with a global exam written by a committee (well, probably more than one). What I'm thinking of is that questions that make perfect sense in the context of a particular class are not particularly appropriate in other contexts.

I think it would have been "nice" if the question about economic systems had asked more specifically about power and decision making. Those topics were implied and the rubric will probably require responses about those topics, but they weren't explicitly required by the question. And, I think the question about "cultural revolutions" is pretty historical -- very appropriate for a course that emphasizes history and not terribly appropriate for a course focusing on political science and contemporary government and politics.

The message I take from these exam questions is

• that learning about the governments and politics of the AP 6 (the countries required in the AP curriculum) is still the most important task for students
  
• that textbooks organized around country-specific chapters are still the most appropriate for the AP course
  
• that while substantive comparative studies are probably more interesting (and, I would argue, most likely to help students learn the factual material), students don't need much more than to be aware of similarities and differences about the AP 6

I'm looking for disagreement, nuances, or just different perspectives.

Use the "comment" link at the bottom of the blog entry here and add your voice to the topic.

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Labels: pedagogy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:19 AM