Advanced placement physics exam performance of high school graduates in Mexico with the aid of online assignments designed in open-edx

Abstract

The advanced placement program (AP) in the United States and Canada has been successful in helping students to gain College credits during the last year of high school. Credits are awarded to high school graduates according to their performance on the AP exam. The content and philosophy of such program is applied to high school graduates in Mexico. During the first year of this work, a group of students was trained through Physics courses with the AP content and principles. The students took the AP exam on Physics before the course, and their scores were slightly improved after the course. The statistical significance of their improvement could not be stablished for this group of students. During the second year of this research, another group of students was exposed to AP content and aided through online assignments, previously designed in Open-EdX with LON-CAPA. The assignments were migrated to the platform Canvas during the last semester of this research. Students were tested through a conceptual exam on force and motion, which has the same spirit as the AP exam, but with a lower level of difficulty. Finally, students are found to improve significantly their performance through the strategy implemented during the second year of this research.