Although there are 7 units in the AP© Human Geography course, these resources focus on Units 1, 4, and 5 as a complement to the instructional materials (Units 2, 3, and 7) designed by World History Digital Education. These three units offer a helpful starting point for review and focus on challenging concepts for students.
Teachers
Unit 1: Thinking Geographically
This module will help students to better understand how to read, interpret, analyze, and understand maps, using Unit 1: Thinking Geographically as a backdrop. The module will provide students with a step-by-step process to help them break down maps to develop deeper understanding. Students will also learn about the importance that naming and labeling maps plays in the message that the creator of the map is attempting to convey.
Every year, the Chief Reader (the person in charge of scoring AP Human Geography Exams) releases a report about how students performed on that year’s exam. A consistent theme of these reports, going back several years, is that students struggle greatly with the skill of reading maps. Therefore, knowledge of how to read and interpret maps is of key importance to help students succeed in this course and on the AP Exam.
The module concludes with a series of stimulus-based multiple-choice questions that allow students to put into practice the map reading skills they have developed throughout the lesson. It also provides a modified FRQ to help students refine writing skills without requiring a full FRQ response.
Unit 4: Political Patterns and Processes - Exploring the Political Geography of South Korea
Using a variety of stimulus material, students will analyze the political geography of South Korea. Students will first classify political entities in the Korean peninsula and then examine the types of political boundaries present. Lastly students will analyze the function of political boundaries - both land and sea boundaries.
Students often have difficulty in applying concepts to the real-world. Chief Reader Reports consistently mention that students memorize vocabulary, but frequently are unprepared when applying those terms to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, students also have the tendency to struggle with stimulus materials. Both of these struggles are vital for students to correct given that students are asked, both in MCQs and on FRQs, to apply concepts to the real-world and two of the three FRQs have stimulus material and 30-40% of the MCQs are stimulus-based. Additionally, students often have a United States-centric frame of reference and the expectation is that students apply concepts to a diverse array of situations around the world.
The political geography unit offers some of the most complex vocabulary for the course, especially in regards to political entities and boundaries. Students need to be able to go beyond memorization to application. Furthermore students need to recognize that most places can fit multiple types of entities and boundaries; therefore they must stretch beyond simple classification of places.
Unit 5: Agriculture and Rural Land-Use Patterns and Processes
This module will help students to better identify key agricultural concepts, as well as developing skills in interpreting and analyzing different types of stimuli. Using the concepts of subsistence and commercial agriculture students will interpret and analyze sources as well as draw connections between a variety of stimuli.
According to reports by the AP Human Geography, Chief Reader, students generally struggle more on questions dealing with the geography of agriculture more than any other topic in the course. Many students live very detached from agricultural production and struggle with applying agricultural concepts beyond just identifying vocabulary. This is compounded by the challenges students face in interpreting pictures, maps, charts, and graphs and the next step to apply concepts to unfamiliar situations related to agriculture.
The module concludes with a series of stimulus-based multiple-choice questions that allow students to put into practice the skills of analysis they have developed throughout the lesson. It also provides a full FRQ to help students refine writing skills and demonstrate their understanding of agriculture and related concepts. This FRQ can be given in full or in discrete parts depending on the instructional goals of the assessment; some might choose to focus narrowly on one concept or skill at a time while others might practice writing a complete FRQ.
