Introduction to AP World History
This is the first of several posts this summer to keep communication lines open with those who attend my AP World History Summer Workshops. Specifically, I want teachers from my workshops to have a summary of what we covered as well as quick links to the resources mentioned on each day. So, here’s a review of day one . .
Equity and Access. First of all, the College Board’s Equity and Access policy is crucial to Advanced Placement programs. This is not packing classes with as many students as possible but seeking out underrepresented subgroups who have the potential to do well in AP classes. (You can find more this at AP Potential.) Recruiting students not traditionally inclined or recommended to take AP classes is a significant change to how many teachers conceive of Advanced Placement. Personally, I find the greatest satisfaction not in the most advanced students who enter my class, but rather in those who are uncertain of themselves, who work hard and are transformed by the effort. There is a risk in opening the class to a wider range of students but I love being part of the experience that awakens students to their potential.
The Nature of AP World History. The main point I try to drive home on Day 1 is the centrality of the Curriculum Framework (CED) to your teaching. I have strong opinions about this and others disagree, but I believe many teachers teach the course in a far too textbook-centric manner. I prefer to draw from a variety of resources with the goal of completely addressing the Learning Objectives, the Historical Developments, and the necessary examples to illustrate them. The textbook is merely one of many resources to that end and my students do not read every one of its chapters. Perhaps I would feel differently if the AP Exam were a big test on Bentley, Strayer or Stearns, but it’s not.This basically refers the the Course and Exam Description, or the CED.
The most practical element of the CED is the Topic Pages that you will use to plan your content lessons. HERE is a list of PDF files of all AP World History Topic Pages, and HERE is a video about how we learned to use the CED to plan out our year. We used Scheduling Your Units of Study 2026 page from the workshop note book to plan.
Several of you have asked how I mash up Units 1 and 2 (so many of these topic pages overlap). Here is a screen shot from my presentation on how I combined topics from the first 2 units to consolidate instruction for the 1200 to 1450 period:
As you devise your own system for teaching the course you might find the Correlation Guides from the textbook publishers helpful. These link they pages of the textbook to the Key Concept outline. However you decided to order content the Curriculum Framework is your friend and keeps you from being overwhelmed by the scope of the subject.
Geography. Students must know the Geographic Regions as outlined in the Curriculum Framework. Confusing regions (East Asia with Southeast Asia for example) can destroy an entire essay attempt. As with the time Periods, there are arguments and ambiguities in these regions students should be aware of (is Egypt in North Africa or the Middle East? Why or why not?) A great video to introduce the POV of map making is this clip from the West Wing TV series. Here is an interesting article of how maps can lie.
Teaching the Basics: Making an Argument
We spent some time the first morning talking about what sets this class apart from regular history classes: students have to make arguments about the past. I begin hammering this home the first 9 weeks of the course and then work this skill into the format of the Long Essay Question and Document Based Question.
The first argument I model for them is about metals and early societies, which you can see HERE. We then move on to the archeological finds from the Indus River Valley. The evidence page is in your workbook, but you can find the entire lesson plan HERE. Although we didn’t do it in the workshop, I have another “Unit Zero” lesson that uses state building during the classical age and gets students to dig further into different types of historical sources.
The Multiple Choice Questions
The first assessment items students see on the AP World History Exam are 55 multiple-choice questions which comprise 40 percent of their exam score. They get 1 minute for each question and all of them are connected to some type of stimulus. The relationship of the stimulus to the question can be categorized into three forms:
Three forms of Multiple Choice Questions:
Type 1: Students utilize one of the Historical Thinking Skills or Reasoning Practices to answer a question using the content of the stimulus alone. Knowledge from the Curriculum Frameworks (Key Concepts) is not necessary. This type of question is intentionally aligned to SAT/PSAT type items.
Type 2: Students analyze content from the stimulus in conjunction with knowledge from the Curriculum Framework to answer a skill-based questioned. The majority of the SBMC questions on the AP test are this type.
Type 3: Students answer a skill-based question on the same topic as the stimulus but actual content from the stimulus is not required. In this type of question, the stimulus merely serves as a segue to the content of the question. The frequency of this type of question on the test is limited.
Note that the SBMC questions generally run chronologically across the exam, beginning with Period 1 and ending with Period 4.
Here is a stimulus we practiced in the workshop to write a SBMC question:
This stimulus could be used to write a question on topic page 5.6:
Screenshot
A good questions might be:
Which of the following was a consequence of the encounter described by Perry in the passage above”
Possible correct answers could be:
The growth of Japan as a regional power in Asia.
or,
The Japanese promoting a state-sponsored form of industrial reform in the Meiji Era.
Many SBMC questions begin with the stem “Which of the following best . . . ” The purpose of this structure is to force students to evaluate question options relative to each other. There might be some
Stimulus-Based Multiple-Choice questions are different than the multiple choice questions students (and their parents) are used to. If students don’t understand this, they will they will not study properly for these tests and become easily frustrated (“I studied for hours and much of what I studied wasn’t even on the test!”)
This is because they are used to memorizing specific facts, or bold type words, and expect these to be the answers on the test. On these exams, the specific facts are usually in the stimulus and students must connect these to a larger general historical development.
A strategy for taking this part of the exam is to read the question prompt first. Then students need to identify which region or time period the question pertains to. This can help eliminate some of the answers. But more importantly, it gives them purpose when analyzing the stimulus; otherwise, if they read the stimulus first, they’ll try to memorize everything about it to bring to the question. These students usually end up reading the stimulus again which can result in them not finishing the multiple-choice part of the exam.
The Short Answer Question (SAQ)
About half way through Day 1 we began to look at the Short Answer Questions for the AP Exam. The basic handout from the workbook is HERE.
On the SAQ, these terms would look like this:
Identify an economic development between 1750 and 1900 that led to the formation of new elites.
- An economic development between 1750 and 1900 that led to the formation of new elites was the industrial revolution
Describe an economic development between 1750 and 1900 that led to the formation of new elites.
- The industrial revolution, a process of shifting production from hand made methods to machine production in factories, led to the formation of new elites between 1759 and 1900.
Explain how an economic development between 1750 and 1900 that led to the formation of new elites.
- Between 1750 and 1900 the industrial revolution led to the formation of new elites. Because industrial production rewarded investors rather than inherited wealth, the middle class gained much and rose to prominence over the aristocracy.
You can find a Covid-Era video of the SAQ presentation I gave on Day 1 HERE (but be mindful of the recent change–no more choice and ALL questions will have a stimulus.)
Here are the 2025 SAQs we graded in our session today along with student samples and scoring guides: