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The Home Stretch: Review Strategies That Work
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by Sue Chaney Gilmore
Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School
Nashville, Tennessee
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"We've never finished a whole textbook in class before!" the students groan as I hand out their March-April syllabus. "You've never taken AP European History before, either," I reply. Ignoring the dictum that every student needs to know everything in the material before moving on, I keep urging them forward. The goal is to finish the once-over lightly (not too lightly, however) by early April and to start the "home stretch" review for the high-stakes exam that is the culminating activity of our year's work.
There are as many ways to do a thorough review as there are successful AP teachers. While the following plan has helped my students succeed over the past 20 years, I constantly help myself to other ideas from the AP European History Electronic Discussion Group, fellow College Board consultants, and, of course, any AP Exam Readers with whom I come into contact. Then I put together the review for the current year. Careful planning is a must because the students are taking other AP Exams, buying their shoes for prom, going on the band trip to New York, and running cross-country almost simultaneously. We all need to know ahead of time what's coming up in the weeks preceding the AP Exam.
Diagnosing Difficulties
A good place to start is the multiple-choice section from a Released Exam. Scores may be either a wake-up call to those who think they remember everything or encouragement for those who are sure they remember absolutely nothing. It's a good idea to score the multiple-choice questions as recommended in the College Board materials; if necessary, however, consider curving your class's grades to be a bit more encouraging. Look at sections of the multiple-choice questions that challenged all of your students to get an idea of areas that need more concentration (my students usually have trouble with the social history questions, which are becoming more and more frequent).
Answering additional multiple-choice questions from previous AP Exams and review books will help students recognize recurring topics. To this end, I make a packet of practice questions on social history, and I also give students the sample questions from past editions of the AP European History Course Description.
Students have surprising difficulty distinguishing results from causes. Try throwing out an event and asking for either cause or result, and you will see what I mean. This type of thinking apparently does not come quickly to many teenagers. Another test-taking "hurdle" students experience is panic at not recognizing an answer immediately; they forget that eliminating the wrong answers to find the right one is not cheating.
Century-a-Day Review
At the beginning of our review for the AP Exam, I do a daily, quick Socratic lecture that covers a few key dates, people, books, and events from a 100-year time span; I start these with 1453 and end with the present -- six overviews in all. On the day after each of these overviews, I give a quiz (questions may include identifying three key figures of the Reformation or naming the author of The Prince); I use multiple-choice questions for easy grading or short-answer questions if students need more recall practice. Also, I promise to drop the lowest of the quiz grades. Approximate divisions for review and discussion might be the following: 1453-1555, 1555-1648, 1648-1750, 1750-1848, 1848-1950, and 1950-present.
If students have taken good notes, saved the handouts, and kept up in general throughout the year, they should find these quizzes doable just by looking over their materials and listening well. The quizzes keep students on their toes, at least, and make them feel that they are reviewing. Good review books are also useful (for example, Barron's How to Prepare for the AP* European History Advanced Placement Examination and the Princeton Review's Cracking the AP* European History Exam).
Essay Outlines
I also hand out a list of free-response questions from past AP Exams, often concentrating on those that compare time periods in some way -- for example, comparing the principles reflected by the provisions of the Congress of Vienna with those reflected by the provisions in the Treaty of Versailles. Students pick any three of the free-response questions to outline. Outlines must be at least two and a half pages in length and have a "B" for every "A," a great surprise for many students who have never learned to outline at all. Students may use phrases except for the thesis statement.
I read the outlines for comprehensiveness and relevance and return them with a grade, often low. Students may then revise and resubmit them, with the revisions in a different-colored ink. This way I am sure my students have paid some attention to at least six different topics, since each question requires knowledge of two topics. For students who have trouble writing a full essay, I urge careful study of these outlines, as they may be able to use the same information if not the same format for free-response questions on the AP Exam.
The Evil DBQ -- The More Evil POV
Teaching students to approach the Document-Based Question (DBQ) correctly is always a challenge. I recommend sharing an attack strategy with your class. Try to prevent your students from experiencing "information overload" while reading the exam's DBQ and all of its supporting materials -- provide a way for them to organize and structure this reading. For instance, you might advise them to concentrate first on determining what the exam question is asking, saving the documents for later. (One way to get to a question's core is to underline or circle every phrase that represents a required feature of an answer.) The exam taker then formulates a good, strong thesis that answers the question. With a firm idea of a potential thesis in place, the student then turns to the documents, reading, taking notes, and adjusting the thesis as needed, even drastically.
All year long I hand out articles and cartoons, asking for the point of view (POV). I have noticed that this is a difficult concept, particularly for tenth-graders -- as well as for the occasional parent who wants to help. The only method for overcoming this difficulty is to keep on explaining POV, ad nauseam. One day the bright light will turn on -- we hope before the AP Exam. Defining and discussing "bias" has not been as useful for my students as my explaining that we are looking for the motivation of the writer; I also make sure my classes know that the people who develop the AP Exam provide enough information in the questions to help the test-taker make a good guess about that motivation.
Practicing DBQs is helpful for students, but for teachers, scoring a lot of DBQs at the end of the year is often unfeasible. Instead, I like to review some DBQs orally in class. One method is to have the students sit in a circle and read a question's documents one at a time, offering interpretations of each text's POV. As they go through the various documents, the class groups them according to POV.
While they go through this exercise, my students have a copy of the scoring guidelines that correspond to each DBQ. This deepens their understanding of what makes an effective answer. You might explain to your class that, although a DBQ's scoring guidelines do not appear on the actual AP Exam, the question will contain sufficient hints about what the AP Exam Readers will look for.
Century Posters
While PowerPoint presentations are nice, nothing beats visuals that stay on the walls of the classroom. Students often remember ideas or projects that they see on posters in other classes -- and react almost as if they were "cheating" when noticing the crossover with AP World History or AP English Literature and Composition.
Here's how the poster project works for AP European History. Buy 12 poster boards or comparable sheets of paper in six colors (perhaps two each of blue, green, orange, pink, white, and yellow). In pairs (or larger groups if you have a big class), students choose one century -- for this activity, 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, or 1900s. Each century's team divides into a political/diplomatic history group and a social/cultural history group. On the poster board, each group then creates visuals for the chosen century and type of history. Make sure to align the chronological order of the centuries with the alphabetical order of the poster colors -- this step is vital to the whole exercise. For instance, 1400s might be blue, 1500s green, 1600s orange, and so forth.
I usually allot a day or so in class to making these posters. Students create flow charts, maps, time lines, cartoon figures -- whatever they feel will help them to remember. Then each group explains the poster, and we put them up in chronological/alphabetical order around the room during the final week before the exam. Often on the afternoon before the exam, I find students walking about the room after school, looking at the posters as they review.
This activity gives students more confidence in periodization and dating, particularly for the area on which they worked. The color code helps them remember the centuries (if the Edict of Nantes was in green on the wall, it must have been in the 1500s).
Final Reminders
About a week before the exam is the time to give students a final, practice multiple-choice exam and then go over the questions carefully. Discuss the wording of distractors and hints for eliminating them. Remind your class that no one is expected to know all the answers or to have covered all the possible material.
On the day of the exam, show up with brain food and offer plenty of encouragement. After all, we are in this together with our students, and they have been working toward this moment all year.
Sue Chaney Gilmore is a College Board consultant in the southeast region. She currently teaches AP European History, AP World History, and AP English Literature and Composition at Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet High School in Nashville, Tennessee. Gilmore has been teaching AP courses since 1976 and has taught at the AP level in seven different subject areas.
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