Putting Together a Course Review
As the month of April begins, it’s also time to start thinking about a course content review (course skills review is a different monster) that would be beneficial for preparing for the AP exam. There’s several approaches one can take, based on how much time is left before the exam, and APUSHslides can help in whichever approach you choose. They are listed below descending in order from how much time is left until the exam.
Active Reviewing - (Time left until the exam: Lots)
Congratulations if this section applies to you! You are being proactive in planning for success on the day of the test. With all of the time you have until the exam it will be useful to listen through all of the lectures. You can take an hour each day and passively listen to them to remind of you concepts you may not have thought about since the fall. If you start four to six weeks from the exam day you should be able to cover the majority of the course before the day of the exam. This method of review assumes that you mastered these concepts or cleared up misunderstandings when you first covered each unit, this is a review after all. If you feel like there are topics in which you need reteaching, it would be beneficial to actively listen to that topic and complete the activities associated with it in the PDF notes.
Thematic Review - (Time left until the exam: 2-3 Weeks)
This is my preferred method of review and it is incorporated into the pacing for how I teach the course. I always leave about two weeks before the exam day to recover the main content in a thematic way. The College Board includes and categorizes each topic by theme, and that’s their way of signaling that they are important and will be utilized in their creation of the exam. Aside from this reason, students have been learning US History chronologically until this point of the year, and reshaping the way in which they think about events can help them understand and remember the events better. Putting history into a thematic view may help them realize that they know a lot about American History as it relates to Politics and Power, but less so about its Social Structures. This method of review helps to find gaps in knowledge and provides a system for filling them!
APUSH Themes:
American National Identity (NAT)
Work, Exchange, and Technology (WXT)
Geography and the Environment (GEO)
Migration and Settlement (MIG)
Politics and Power (PCE)
America in the World (WOR)
American and Regional Culture (ARC)
Social Structures (SOC)
In my class we create a study aid of all of the themes split by period. This can be done through a slides project or on paper. Students will create one slide or page per theme per period. There are eight themes and nine historical periods, yielding 72 slides or pages, depending on the format. In each slide, students will have to include three people and three key terms, defined. One rule that helps push students in their learning is disallowing any repeat terms or people across themes. It will force them to subconsciously categorize where a term fit best or move terms around that fit multiple themes to fill harder themes. Additionally, students will add one picture and a primary source document that fits the theme. Finally, students will write one sentence about the theme in the period, identifying a continuity or change throughout the period related to the theme. It sounds like a lot of work but it goes fast once you get the hang of it. You can look at the example below from Period 1.
How can APUSHslides help in completing this review? The themes for each historical topic is alway listed below the title of each set of notes and always identified in each lecture. When completing the review for each theme in a certain period, the classification process can help students find information quicker. All of the things that they would have to include into their theme review would be bolded in the lecture and filled in to the notes.
Last Resort Cram/Final Run Through - (Time left until the exam: 1 Week or less)
We don’t judge here, you may have had a lot of AP exams to prepare for and you may have run out of time. Or you may have done everything right up until the last few days of the exam and just want a short way to review to increase your confidence before the big day. The best way to get the most efficient review in these scenarios is to utilize the first lecture of each historical topic. The College Board seemed to be thinking ahead when they designed the historical topics. Not only did the first lecture of each unit provide a solid foundation before diving deeper into each topic, but they also work as a quick review!
To make this kind of review easier, there is now a dedicated playlist on the YouTube channel where you can find all of the Period Contextualization videos. It will take about 4 hours to get through all of them, a short amount of time considering they cover 530+ years of history!