Psychology Commons^™

The number of high school students who have taken and passed Advanced Placement (AP) exams has more than doubled since 2000. In this article, we examined whether this increased participation in the AP program has impacted twelfth-grade students' scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in mathematics, reading, and U.S. history for all students and for five major ethnic/racial groups: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American students. We found that the drastic increase in AP tests taken has coincided with improved NAEP scores in mathematics, but not in reading or U.S. history. We explored possible explanations …

Like many human characteristics, intelligence is theorized to be normally distributed. However, a vocal minority of researchers and practitioners who study individuals with high intelligence have claimed that there are more people in the upper echelons of intelligence than would be expected if the normal curve accurately modeled the distribution of intelligence scores. To verify this claim we carefully searched articles form the journal Intelligence dated 1979 to 2012, completed an academic journal search and reviewed national data sets for samples that permit this claim to be tested. To be included samples must have been (a) representative of the population …