Like many of you, I am in the process of re-working my exams to get our kids aligned with the changes made to our exam. In the process, I’ve learned a lot and wanted to share my journey into question stems for the AP exam.

Over the past week, I used the new College Board test bank’s handy filtering system and sifted through all of the stimulus based questions for multiple choice.  I made a list of all of the question stems, and omitted content specific text. I then place them into categories for each stimulus type (Maps, Charts, Images, Models, Diagrams).  Except for the very low-order stems, I was able to connect the goals to the Course Content’s Big Ideas and Course Skills:

Big Ideas:

1. Patterns & Spatial Organization (PSO)
2. Impacts & Interactions (IMP)
3. Spatial Processes & Societal Changes (SPS)

Course Skills:

1. Concepts & Processes
2. Spatial Relationships
3. Data Analysis
4. Source Analysis
5. Scale Analysis

I wrote about the Big Ideas and the new CED in an earlier post, if you want to have a look-see.

Anyway, here are the categories that I came up with:

MAPS

• Identification of map components (3)
• Identification of map variables (PSO) (3)
• Explanation (PSO) (1-5)
• Likely outcome (IMP) (2)
• Limitations (IMP) (1)
• Additional information (PSO) (4)
• Map comparison (SPS) (2) (4)

CHARTS

• Location identification (3)
• Identification of chart variables (PSO) (3)
• Explanation (PSO) (1-5)
• Chart/image combo comparison (SPS)  (2) (4)
• Multiple Chart comparison (PSO)
• Limitations (IMP)  (1)
• Likely Causes (IMP) (2)
• Likely outcome (IMP) (2)
• Scale of Analysis (SPS) (5)

IMAGES (Especially for the Agriculture unit)

• Image comparison (SPS) (2) (4)
• Explanation (PSO) (1-5)
• Likely outcome (IMP) (2)
• Cause/Effect (IMP) (2)
• Applying geographic concepts (IMP)  (1)

MODELS

• Explanation (PSO) (1-5)
• Likely outcome (IMP) (2)
• Limitations (IMP)  (1)

DIAGRAM (smallest number of examples by far)

• Applying diagram components (3)

Please check out the list of question stems here. Feel free to make a copy to your Google Drive and consider them when making questions for your students.

My initial observations of the stems include:

• Oddly, for map stimulus, I did not run across an example that asked to identify a location.
• College Board had, BY FAR, the most stimulus questions for maps, charts, and images.
• College Board had the least amount of stimulus questions for models, diagrams, and text.
• The low-order questions that are not tied to Big Ideas are very infrequent. Kudos to CB for keeping the bar high, especially for those exclusive APUSH teachers who say the course is too easy, but have trouble making two-cents out of a graph.
• I think the toughest questions to create (and answer for that matter) will be limitations, likely outcomes, likely causes, and additional information required. I think the kids who are getting these questions right, are our 5’s. They certainly are high-order in nature. Quite frankly, the teacher that creates these earns 5 gold stars too, because that takes about 20 minutes of brain power per question!

Early reviews for College Board’s new question bank are an A-/B+. I am a huge fan of the filtering system, but from what I understand about the exam in May, there will be a couple/few multiple choice questions that are tied to a single stimulus (more-so in line with the SAT format). From what I see, this is NOT the way that students practice these on the multiple choice formative assessments that are provided. There were two instances where I did see the same image stimulus and two different question stems, but the questions were not different enough to be on the same exam, and most likely one was meant for pushing out to students (formative), the other for teacher summative creation. I do thing this is solely a platform issue and something they could easily improve on. I think I will make it a point to create two different stimulus questions, each connected with two to three questions per stimulus, on my personal unit exams.

Remember that our multiple choice exams are not ALL stimulus based, and according to College Board is only 30-40% of the 60 question MC exam. I will personally aim for 18-24 stimulus questions on my unit summatives.

Ultimately, I did this exercise so that I can write better questions for my students and use the same style of question stems that College Board uses. Maybe you are like me and haven’t had any formal professional development about how to write a question for exams since teacher school at university. Heck, maybe never. It is, however, incredibly important, and dare I say pretty interesting if you spend some time learning about what goes into writing a good question. There is a whole science behind it, and Vanderbilt has an AWESOME guide to help understand it all, I highly encourage a skim. In fact, their entire Center for Teaching website is outstanding.

The ways that questions are posed on the SAT and ACT changes throughout the years and it’s important that I following the trends, for my students’ sake. At school, I encourage students to predict the types of questions they might see on an exam, as it helps encourage active reading (hence Cornell-style notes). For me, this will come in the form of question writing for my unit exams.

If you haven’t checked out the crowdsourced effort of stimulus questions, head to the Facebook group and ask for a link. For obvious reasons, it can’t be posted here.

Happy stimulus writing people,

H.I.