Alternative classroom assessment in AP human geography

The Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) course introduced by the College Board in the fall of 2000 exemplifies a recent emphasis on improving geographic instruction on the secondary level. The College Board's course description focuses upon genuine geographic inquiry and analysis, moving APHG students beyond the declarative place-location knowledge that has typified "school geography" for most of the past century. This explicit emphasis on authentic geographic inquiry also aligns the course with models of instruction for advanced learners emanating from the gifted education field.;However, the analytical orientation of the course implicitly challenges APHG teachers to align their classroom assessments with inquiry-based learning objectives. A substantial literature base identifies classroom assessment as an area in which teacher decisions directly and profoundly affect the nature of student learning. Recent research by the National Research Council and others has begun to question the learning elicited by AP courses in which teachers rely too heavily upon classroom assessments that mirror the format(s) of year-end examinations.;The present study examines classroom assessment within the AP Human Geography instructional context. Underlying this examination is a premise that assessing students in a manner consistent with the instructional objectives of the course will involve teachers developing and/or using non-traditional, or "alternative" classroom assessments. Quantitative data were gathered from a national sample of APHG teachers in the spring of 2003. The findings suggest there are a substantial number of these teachers who do not appear to be orienting their course assessments toward authentic geographic skills as advocated within the geography education literature. These teachers are fashioning their classroom assessments to mirror the culminating APHG examination, even though the exam format is largely incapable of measuring authentic geographic inquiry and analysis. Less frequent use of alternative assessments appears to be indicative of an overall lower fidelity approach to teaching the APHG course on the part of some teachers. In addition to providing support for these and other assertions, the data collected as part of the present study helps clarify the various factors that are influencing teachers' assessment choices.