What does salary have to do with it? Working in small groups, scholars use percentages to find simple interest and the value of a car they can afford on a given salary. Learners continue on to work with salaries and calculate amounts...

Find the height from afar. Teams role play as summer interns to find the height of a set of windows from the outside. Scholars must first determine how to find the height with the available tools. After determining a strategy involving...

Unlike a volcano, the lesson won't blow up in your face. Young mathematicians use dried beans to discover the relationship between the volumes of cones and cylinders and to write a formula for the volume of a cone. They then research...

Conduct indirect measurements three ways. Working in groups, pupils come up with different ways to measure three tall objects indirectly. The teacher provides measurement information requested by the teams, and learners then calculate...

Drop scatter plots onto the class. Teams collect data to determine how far an action figure will fall suspended by rubber bands. Using the collected data, groups determine a line of best fit. Given a drop height, they also determine the...

How fast does it grow? Scholars work on two tasks dealing with exponential growth, one on population growth and the second on investments. Learners research a country's population over the past century and make predictions of the current...

Connect end behavior to previous learning. Pupils connect finding the end behavior of rational functions to finding end behavior of polynomial functions. The 13th segment in a 23-part unit starts with finding the end behavior or power...

How did the chicken travel down the road? Given a picture of a chicken truck, class members brainstorm what information they need to determine the total number of chickens on the truck. Pupils research for the information and devise a...

Knowing the questions ahead of time should be beneficial. Free-response questions released from the 2007 AP® Statistics tests provide teachers and pupils insight into the types of questions on the exam. The six open-ended questions show...

Closer to 2010 than expected. Several of the 1999 AP® Statistics free-response questions align to Common Core standards. Items ask pupils to analyze residuals, two-way tables, and calculate expected values to determine the fairness...

Get a better grasp of the intended content. The six free-response questions provide insight into the purpose of the AP® Calculus content. Two questions have real-world context while the remaining are void of context. The items range from...

Half are real-world. The 2011 AP® Calculus AB free-response questions let pupils and teachers see how content appears on the exam. Half of the questions contain real-world context, and four items do not allow calculators. Real-world...

Don't cross the line; just walk along it. Scholars investigate a scenario in which a person starts at zero on a number line, then moves left or right depending on a flip of a coin. They determine the number of outcomes for six flips,...

Test the test takers' knowledge of statistics about data from the SAT and ACT tests. Future collegians explore the idea of gender and racial bias in high-stakes college admissions exams. They analyze historical data on average scores by...

Plant the fruits of trigonometry. Pairs work through the process of finding the best place to plant fruit trees on a piece of property. The scholars must take into consideration the location of the property and the solar zenith angle. To...

Small groups analyze the attendance at a movie theater and determine the amount of money made for per show. Team members calculate the number of shows it would take for a theater to make a profit after purchasing a new digital projector....